The last activity from our Dayton Trip that I want to write about is our time at Mission of Mary Farms.
The mission has a special place in my heart because from the first time I came to the farm and met Stephen, the garden manager, several things that God had been teaching me started to collide and morph together to form how I feel God is calling His people to live, and, maybe more significantly, how we’ve been missing it.
We live in a culture today in which place is unsettled and time isn’t fast enough. We were made for community; we settle for Facebook friends. We exist to reflect the image of God to creation; but the only image we care about is our own.
What if we were created to live in the world more intentionally than that?
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Many of Jesus’s parables have to do with farming. We tend to look at this and suggest it had to do with 1st century Palestine being a largely agricultural community; so we take our moral lessons and leave. What we miss, however, is that maybe Jesus was intentionally using farming metaphors, and that perhaps through this purposeful use of metaphor He was subtly preparing us for the way of the Kingdom, and not just the doing.
Let me explain it this way: Farming is a slow process. Slow, but not lazy or inactive. In fact, farming is a much more “active” type of lifestyle than most of us are even aware of. Yes, the farmer is busy and works long, hard hours, but it’s not just about the farmer’s schedule. The ground itself, the land, is busily moving below the surface. In fact, one might say that in comparison to the work of the land, the farmer does relatively little. It is not the farmer’s role to work himself into a frenzy, it is his to wait and prepare. A good farmer knows that there is little he can do to make the ground work faster, and anything he might try could actually impede the process of growth. Whether planting or harvesting, the farmer is simply stepping into the work that the land is already doing.
But this means that the farmer must know the land; he must trust that it is operating the way it is meant to. The farmer also must understand that his primary role is to operate in support of the land, and that he is largely replaceable. The soil is not.
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There is much and more that could and probably should be said about how this work of the land correlates with the work of the Kingdom. If you are interested, pick up the works of Wendell Berry. I also realize that it is ludicrous to attempt to sum up the vast number of Jesus’s parables into one simple concept. There is so much untapped depth to the teachings of Christ.
The point is this: we must take a hard look at how we live our lives for the Kingdom. Are we deeply invested in the community around us, like a farmer to the soil? Are we trusting God to be working under the surface even when we don’t see it? Are we more invested in what God is up to, or what we think needs to happen? Do we live as if people are being written into our story, or are we looking for how we can step into and be used to change theirs?
In our week at Mission of Mary we were blessed to spend time with people who understand these concepts for both farming and the Kingdom. The week afforded us the opportunity to slow down our busy lives and look around us what God is doing. We got to know our city, and we got to know each other. This is largely impossible at the pace at which we typically run our lives. Learn from us as we learn from others: slow down, know the ground, and step into the work that God is already doing around you.
