Opening up to life as it comes

Ann Voskamp writes today from her farm,

...It’s worth living a life so you’re kids can see it: there’s a lot of happiness in this world that depends on being brave enough to keep working when it’d be easier to quit.

Nothing good gets started without getting to work. And nothing great gets finished without staying at the work.

And no one express-ships the prize to you. You have to actually work to win it.

...We work this many hours getting a harvest off and the kids know it not at a cerebral level but in their aching muscles: Laziness looks like a friend, but only work can invite you home.

Most opportunities come to you dressed in a pair of thread-bare Wranglers and sweating like work and you’ll miss them if you’re too afraid of callouses and plowing through like a horse.

And none of us here have really got time for being bored. There is only time for work and time for love —- and that is usually one in the same thing.There is only time for work and time for love —- and that is usually one in the same thing.

We work this many hours getting a harvest off and the kids know it not at a cerebral level but in their aching muscles: Laziness looks like a friend, but only work can invite you home.

Most opportunities come to you dressed in a pair of thread-bare Wranglers and sweating like work and you’ll miss them if you’re too afraid of callouses and plowing through like a horse.

And none of us here have really got time for being bored. There is only time for work and time for love —- and that is usually one in the same thing.There is only time for work and time for love —- and that is usually one in the same thing.

There is no time after that.

“I don’t know if I can be a farmer, Mama —“ Malakai leans over from the steering wheel, whispers it to me quiet as the tractor idles. “Don’t know if I’m tough enough for everything that you get wrong.”

Don’t I know that, son. And I lay my hand gently on the back of the boy’s slender neck. Sometimes somebody says only a handful of words and they reach out and touch you not with their hands but their heart.

Yeah, kid —- we work but not as ones who do not know the relief of grace. We work hard but not as ones who grow hard. We work with our hands but what we’re ultimately always working out is our salvation.

“You know —“ I run my hand through Kai’s mop of hair. “We all get things wrong, Kai — we get things wrong, things seem to go wrong, even — or mostly —- we are wrong. But it’s not about growing tough enough to take life… It’s about staying open enough to life to receive it.”

Future men, future women need to know how to work —- and they need to know how to work out their salvation. It’s not about growing tough — it’s about growing open to life as it comes and simply growing.

How do you tell a farm boy that one of the most important things in life is this: To thrive is to surrender to a kind of openness. To surrender control and trust One who is in control —- though you will be taken beyond what you can control and into a kind of brokenness, a brokenness that will hurt and yet be kind. A painful grace.

This is the essence of really living, what it means to essentially be alive: surrender unshielded to the unknown — because there is a deeper Love that is Knowable.

...You are made of dust because you are made to move in this world like a reed, not like a rock.
You were made to feel, you were made to bend vulnerable in wind, you were made to have the courage to reach for the sun.

It’s what the fields of wheat tell you: You were made to grow and that only happens if you are fragile and brave enough to break.

Sure, they’ll go ahead and loudly tell you need to be like a rock, that you’ll need to harden up to live in a harsh world, that you’ll need to be impenetrable, that you’ll need to be unmoved, but no one ever felt any of the really living that way. Live as hard as a rock long enough and there’s hardly any point to breathing. Rocks don’t. They’re dead.

It’s thin-skinned reeds that bravely breathe in their own way. It’s tender reeds that are deeply rooted. It’s only reeds reach for sun.

Rocks are formidable and reeds are fragile — and one is perfectly dead and only the other is exquisitely alive. Humanity’s particular beauty is only possible because of its fragility.

Your Beauty is not in your formidableness but in your fragility.

I tell Kai this. The boy brims and nods and the boy’s a mess like his mother but I’ll take him anyway, keep taking him anyway.

The thing is —- when you already have a rock, you can live the beauty of a reed.

Malakai hauls wheat wagons till 9:30 on a Saturday night, then heads to the barn and feeds a couple hundred sows.

The Farmer and Levi finish up in the field, get the wagons away, the auger down, the bin sealed up, all the tractors home and in the shed, and drag in the back door sometime between 11:50pm and the Lord’s day, a 20 hour day for the man and his boys.

Come Sunday, our Miz Hope-girl, she’s fills bowls up of her chicken salad, and a heap of fresh kale chips that she taken straight from garden to oven to plate, and these pans full of sweet potato fries that she’s made late into the night for a picnic of 17, 12 kids and a grandma, 2 sisters and our good men. It’s a thing to watch how she moves over her offering.

Humble work always becomes a work of art when signed with love.

Read more here, and, as always, enjoy Ann's photography.