“As soon as you open the door, it hits you. ‘Ah, spring in the country!’ “ She laughs and offers her tousled red-haired daughter another cookie.
“Well, it’s like I was telling Emily on the way over here. There isn’t a block in the whole county that doesn’t reek today.”
The two friends chuckle and I nod and smile too, us this cluster of community at the back of a country church on a Wednesday night. The children’s club closing program has concluded and the church is all a bustle with happy kids nibbling on treats from the refreshment table, mothers talking of tilling up gardens, the fathers who are there and not on the seats of tractors, making plans for the work bee to reroof the church come Saturday morning. A toddler needs a refilling of pink juice so I take her hand and we weave through the crowd.
In the midst of the milieu of swirling children, I pour juice and revisit a scene, words, from earlier in our day.
On the headland of a dusty two hundred acres, I stood waiting for him. Tractor roars down the field, cultivator working up earth behind him. The wind flaps about skirt hem and the apron I forgot to slip off in my haste to get the meal to the field and his empty stomach. Are fields all over the countryside dotted with waiting farm wives, aprons flying on spring winds, arms full of food for work-worn men? The tractor looms, rumbles to an idling halt. He swings open the cab door. Large rocks he’s gathered from the last few passes across the field line the steps up to the cab. One by one, he tosses them off into a pile in the ditch, and I step close with his lunch basket.
Instead of raising his voice over the engine, he motions to his dirty shirt, my dress, explaining with hands why he thinks it best not to offer a hug. I laugh, him joining too, and he leans in to kiss this forehead. We rest there for a moment, lingering touch on the edge of a wind-blown field on an afternoon in late April.
Another tractor whirling down the gravel road in a cloud of dust, manure spreader behind, interrupts us. He steps back, adjusts his cap. “You know,” I raise my voice, “I was thinking of this on the way to the field. The fragrance of spring’s new life is that of rot and decay.” I nod towards the passing manure spreader.
Farmer Husband presses in close, his soft voice competing with the tractors. “True.” He points towards last year’s corn stalks wrapped around the teeth of the cultivator that he’s been pulling across this field all day. “Manure yes, but the more debris and dying matter from last year’s crop too, the richer the soil bed for this year’s crop.”
I look across the dirt stretching towards the horizon. We’ve spread manure over this land already, beginning of the week.
“Yes, more that dies, more that lives.”
He takes the lunch basket from my hand, brushes with a kiss again, and hauls back up into that tractor cab and waiting steering wheel.
But his words echo through the rest of my day, revisiting me here tonight in a full country church, us womenfolk talking of hanging out lines of laundry, working up sleepy gardens, and the countryside wafting with the smell of sweet manure.
“More that dies, more that lives.”
Out into the falling dusk, these church folks slowly spill, frogs of the church pond filling the night with their croaky chorus. And we all mingle under the shy stars twinkling, the air pungent with death, and I look at these people, a body of believers, a people called to live new life.
But the daily death comes first. The more that dies…..
The more He lives.
Scripture Drink:
“Could it be any clearer?
Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ,
a decisive end to that sin-miserable life…
What we believe is this:
If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death,
we also get included in his life-saving resurrection.”
Lord, my dying today may not smell pretty. But it is necessary for the new life You want to grow in me. Where can I die today? The more I die…. the more You live.
