Count Your Blessings

Last week, I spent two days driving across the country -- from Newark, through the Shenandoah Valley, over the foothills of the Appalachians and into the Smoky Mountains. Within a few hours of starting the drive, our landscape changed. If you drive along the interstate highways out of Delaware, towards the West, you'll see fields -- everywhere. Corn, beans, and wheat mostly, and in abundance. But then, once the ground starts to roll and the hills appear, everything changes. There may be fields, but the crops are smaller. There may be fields, but they don't hug the interstate for miles on end.

No, I felt the change pretty dramatically. The landscape was beautiful. Mountains and hills are wonderful, and I feel like my heart could drink in the sight for years and years. "I want to see mountains again, Gandalf -- mountains! and then find somewhere I can rest." Does that heart of Bilbo Baggins lie in all of us, or just in me and some eccentric few?

And then there were the hillside fields I was driving through -- close-cropped by horses, or by drought -- where large rocks just shoved their way through the surface. The topsoil must be only inches deep in many places, and that's where the rocks aren't immediately below the grass! How do people farm here? The answer is -- mostly, they don't. (We should thank God and our forefathers for that element of our modern civilization that allows timber to be grown here, and rocks mined there, and food grown another place -- and all of us can trade and live much better lives than we would on our own!)

I thought back to our region. Do you know what? The land is fertile and easy to farm. The soil is deep, and the rain is fairly consistent. We have a good set of seasons, with cold to kill insects and diseases, and sufficient heat to grow a notably rich variety of crops. We live in a paradise of local produce.

Let us count this among our blessings. Perhaps we will see mountains again before we find somewhere to rest. And in the meantime, we can eat fresher, more nourishing fruits and vegetables than can be found anywhere else in the world.

Thanks be to God.