About 45 minutes east of Des Moines, Iowa is a little town called Sully. Sully is a town of about 1000 people. Sully is a Dutch community and it’s evident by its’ Nordic decent people. Just south of Sully is a large 200-acre farm. It seems large to me since my subdivision lot is barely a quarter of an acre.
In the summertime this farm like all the other farms in this part of Iowa is covered with corn. From an airplane it looks like an ocean of green. In the winter it looks much like rolling hills of brown and tan carpet except where the farmers have plowed in the poop from their hog houses. During the winter, these areas where this rich organic fertilizer has been tilled into the black soil, from the air, looks like a giant hand has come down from the sky and made alien symbols on the ground. This discoloration in the soil only lasts during the winter. The poop makes the rich Iowa soil even more fertile for the spring plantings.
Most of these farms have been in the same families for at least three to four generations, that is, until the middle 1980’s. Well let’s back up a decade to the 70’s first. This area of the country is well watered by annual rains and is considered part of the breadbasket of America and 90% of these farms produce some of the largest crops of corn that America uses. However. due to an unusual drought in the 1970’s, many farmers in this area were living on borrowed time. They had to mortgage their homes, land, and equipment just to feed their families. Then in the 1980’s interest rates on all these loans were in the double digits, which forced many families to sell the farms that had been in their families for generations; generations of sacrifice for the next generation were gone in less than ten years.
As I sat in the car on the way back from running errands in Sully to the farm and listened to this story, I began to wonder how my friends John and Pam, third-generation farmers, had managed to keep their farm during this very painful time in their family’s history while raising five children of which three were foster children. Pam begins to explain that they were in the same situation during the 70’s and 80’s as all of the other farmers in their community. “Everyone was trying to dig out from under their mountain of debt; some made it but many did not.” Many families wound up living with relatives or moving their entire families to other states just to find work. Very sad times indeed. I asked Pam how they had managed to keep their place. Her answer did not surprise me since they were a family of Christ followers, but the following revelation changed something inside of me. It made me want to be more like my friends John and Pam. Pam said, “We got on our knees and asked God to help us keep our farm.”
The previous Sunday night I had attended church with John and Pam. It was not the typical adult service. It was a Sunday night service called “The Journey”. On the way to church I learned that John and Pam were small group youth leaders. When we arrived at church I met the youth pastor, Jim. Pastor Jim was a tall friendly and clean-shaven man in his early 30s. When we arrived, the gym was filling up with junior and senior high youth dressed in athletic wear.
They were having dodge ball practice in preparation for an upcoming contest with other churches in the area. After about an hour of dodging a room full of balls, although John had not been so lucky and had gotten hit on the side of the head, we all went to the youth room where the youth band did a great job leading worship. Then Pastor Jim gave a brief message about the difference between “doing a service” for someone and “being a servant at heart”. After which time the youth gathered into small groups. My friends Jerry and Pam each had about a dozen youths. Pam had the junior high girls and John had the junior high boys. I sat in with John and his group.
The focus for the youth group was not a pre-written lesson. It was something very revealing about their culture. Pastor Jim had given everyone a handout. It was a half sheet of paper with two paragraphs. The first paragraph had four lines about a family who recently had lost their home in a fire. The Pierce family had lost everything they had. The family had two sons 17 and 12, and two daughters 14 and 8. The second paragraph was about the Houck family. The dad had severe health issues and due to his lengthy stay in the hospital had lost his job and the family with three children from 9 to 19, were totally out of money. It was December 6th, nineteen days before Christmas.
I sat in a room with John and his eleven junior high boys. As I listened to each one of these young men pray, they did not pray as I expected a young teen to pray. Each young man prayed with passion and individually asked God to bless each member of the Pierce and Houck families. As a youth group they asked God to help them raise money for these families, thousands of dollars. I later found out that most of the youth worked jobs and used their own Christmas money to give to these two families. “These folks are creating a generation of life-giving people,” I thought.
Then I remembered what Pam had just told me in the car. “We got on our knees and ask God to help us save our farm.” As we pulled back onto the gravel road for the seven minute drive to their farm, I realized that these were God’s people. These people were Holy. They loved God with everything they had and with everything with in them. Jesus Christ was their Lord and yes the Savior of their farm.
These people don’t go to church only once a week to meet with God but they live in His presence everyday. They, with purpose, seek the face of their life-giving God. They know him personally like anyone who would know their closest love ones. They had set themselves apart to love Jesus more than anything and even more than their land or any other possession. They freely shared with those around them. When they prayed, “God help us save our land,” Jesus wanted to save their land as much as they wanted to save their land. Maybe even more, because he loves them and everything they care about which was more than their farms.
On the Jesus Culture album, “Consumed”, Kim Walker in the last 30 seconds of the song “Holy”, sings these words...the generation marked with Holiness…a generation of people who know your love… to know your holiness… a generation marked by your love… set apart Holy unto you Oh, God.”
Be Holy and Be Life-giving,
Alex Anderson
Permission to re-post
Alex Anderson copyright 2011
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