Singing Your Part
Wednesday (November 12)
Singing Your Part
Psalm 65:12-13
The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.
During the year I lived in the little town of Lampeter, Wales, a local Welshman told me about a path that led up a steep hill, through a little gate, into a small forest, and out into miles of rolling pasturelands. Along the path was a tall bare hill that once housed a Roman fort back in the old worl —proof that all roads, even cobbled country roads, really do lead to Rome—and that place became a haven to my soul. While most foreign students were busy buying cheap plane and train tickets and venturing across Europe to Eiffel Towers and Colosseums and Stonehenges, I was content to rest in these quiet hillsides, with only the sheep to keep me company. To think of how many hours I spent there, reading my history books for class, chasing sheep—which are much faster than you’d think—praying, singing, and looking up at the stars. And although I’m not a shepherd nor a farmer, I’ve always been profoundly allured by green pastures and rolling hillsides and sheep-filled meadows. In fact, just reading Psalm 65 right now makes me pine again to walk that little path through the Welsh countryside.
Henry David Thoreau could not have been more wrong in his book, Walden Pond, when he derided the New England farmers for their industries of cow-milking and cheese-making and pig-farming, or when he looked out at a grassy pasture outlined by hand-hewn fence beams and saw them as a blight against nature, believing that the world is at its best when it remains wild and untouched by human endeavor. That has never been the LORD’s vision, has it? In the biblical ideal, the earth isn’t void of human cultivation and farming but distinguished by it. Just read Isaiah 11, which gives a vivid portraiture of a wide pastureland, where lions and lambs lie down together in a grove of trees, and where bears graze with oxen on the lush grasses of the valley, and where man, a child here, can eternally play rather than toil under the sun.
Friend, there’s an earthy choir singing all around you today, hymning the LORD’s provision, and David invites you to join in the song.