In the afternoons, I spend more than an hour sitting in two different carpool lines to pick up my kids. Living in a rural area, one of those lines is flanked by fields. Cotton on one side, soybeans on the other. This afternoon, I rolled down the windows in my van and let the breeze blow through. As flat as rural, southeast Missouri is, there’s nothing to block the wind. Not a tree close enough to matter and definitely no hills. The tree line in the far distance serves only to mark the delineation between crops. This side of the trees is cotton, the other is sorghum. The wind is relentless. And welcome with its blessed relief from summer’s heat.
I kept my eyes on the sky while sitting in line today. Puffy white clouds stood out against that piercing shade of blue that lets you know October is here. I think we can tell an October sky from a September one. The absence of haze. The horizon emptied of humidity. You can see the difference once fall arrives.
The fields near my son’s school stretch as far as you can see. This is farming country. I watch the fields from plowing to planting to harvest to fallow. Sometimes the farmers burn the fields before leaving them to rest in winter. In our neck of the woods, we’re waiting on the cotton harvest. Every fall, our little town has a festival called the Cotton Carnival to note the changing of the seasons. The crop-dusters will soon start their dip-diving, low flights over the fields to spray defoliant, a substance that wilts the leaves on the cotton plants for an easier harvest but gives us all raging head colds. Once the harvest is complete, the landscape around here is pretty dreary. It’s flat as far as you can see and gray, gray, gray. All through the late fall and winter and well into March. Gray skies, gray fields. In winter, it’s hard to see the horizon sometimes.
When I was fifteen years old, my parents took my sister and me on a trip to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We made it nearly to the top of Pike’s Peak before our car overheated. It was July, and coming from Tennessee with its sweltering heat and humidity, we wore shorts. But Pike’s Peak still had snow. We stood at the edge of the world and shivered. I kept my feet as close to the precipice as my mom could tolerate, and I looked until my eyes ached. The mountains. They rose up like giants. The valleys scooped low. The plains stretched out far in the distance.
If I’d known the Psalms the way I do know, surely I’d have proclaimed, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?” The spectacular views before me spoke of the grandeur of the God I was learning to love, but I didn’t have the words. The wind whipped my hair around my face, raised the pores on my legs. Eventually, I crept back into the family van, chilled to the bone and wondering why I couldn’t speak.
Life has held a bit of change for me lately. A new job, a new schedule, some different ministry endeavors, some challenges in parenting I don’t know how to handle. I’ve never been good at change. Even anticipation—the good kind—heaps up twists of anxiety in my chest. I haven’t yet taught my body to obey my mind. “I’m not stressed,” I tell myself, though my stomach knots itself over and over and my heart can’t find its regular rhythm. I feel off-kilter, which is not really unusual after a half a year of pandemic. Nothing is trustworthy. I can’t often find the words for what I feel.
But here’s what I know about feeling off-kilter, unsettled, weary, and wary of change: the Lord isn’t any of those things. And what a relief that is!
Every morning, I silence my alarm clock, head to the coffee pot, pour a cup, sit down with my Bible, and open up the Word of the Lord to be reminded that though I am struggling to put one foot in front of another, God never tires, never grows impatient, never feels “off,” never knows uncertainty. He is certainty itself.
I think of that certainty when my eyes find the tree line off in the distance. Crops, fields, miles and miles of sky. There aren’t any hills to lift my eyes to, but I know where my help comes from. My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. The fashioner of mountains and vistas, the crafter of flatlands and cotton. I see his handiwork in the stretching of earth and the blossom of fabric. He is the keeper of earth and sky and my heart and yours. No cotton boll goes unnoticed by him, nor any fleeting fear or uncertainty of mine. The mountains are his, the fields are his, my heart is his.
My youngest son climbed in the car after school today and began rummaging through the contents of his backpack. A ziploc bag of cotton sat on top of his lunchbox. “Where did this come from?” I asked him. “We crossed the street with our teacher and picked some cotton,” he said.
I fingered its softness in my hands. “This could become a shirt one day,” I told him.
Sometimes I can’t find the words. Sometimes I can.
I lift up my eyes to hills. I lift them up to the fields.
Where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
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