The Dry and Cracked Dirt Story

It was through broken translation and a racing mind piecing the English together I began to understand he was trying to tell me that the land was yielding much crop.  He was telling the four of us how it was a drought, but the soil was so moist on his land, and for no known reason apart from the gospel.  He was so humbled it was like tangible gratitude dripping from his mouth with each word on how the rest of the region was struggling to produce crops to sell and have income, but his family had been blessed. 

I didn’t understand the significance until long after my flight landed and I had Starbucks and clean clothes again.  I didn’t understand that as we stood there and watched the dry and cracked soil overturned with a hoe, that it was so much more than dry dirt, wet dirt and the days worth of work for these Africans.  

I haven’t forgotten the sound of him and his family sitting in a small room late one evening singing so loudly and so off key, but never more beautifully.  They sang in more languages than I understood.  Small children fell asleep on grandmothers laps to the tune and it was as though in the middle of this village, where I rode on bicycle taxi for 45 minutes to arrive- the presence of God dwelled. 

That hoe hit the soil and as it was pulled up again and again flipping the dirt from dry to wet the sound of old roots crunched and tore.  The leftovers had to be broke up once and for all.  The once dry and wet is able to yield again once the fresh soil is sky up.  You see, in a place where the soil should be dry for feet down into the earth, there was moisture and streams of water under that cracked, dry, old dirt. 

My heart, it stood in that field watched and heard the hoe hit the ground and pull forth new soil.  In that field with people who spoke a language I didn’t understand, but loved my like my own family does and in a place where everything I once knew was so far from me ---I know Jesus was putting a hoe to the soil of my heart and soul and transforming it from cracked, hurt, broken and dry to let his rivers of life and grace flow again.  Jesus was preparing my heart for what would come once back stateside, starbucks and clean laundry.

I usually just cry when I think of this.  When I realize what happened in that field I could have cared less about while standing there with African sun burning my face. 

Many nights after returning to the states I began to realize what that man was trying to tell me- it was so much more than how his farm was yielding much crop admits a drought.  He was telling me how Jesus does this- he turns the dead to life and provides gushing waters in places that should be barren.  A small African man was able to teach me a lesson I so desperately needed to pour over my utterly broken and helpless soul, it was there the sewing across the rips of my heart that emotion and hurt gushed out of began. 

The soil turns over and over with abundant streams that yield life where the presence of God dwells, its grace and there’s always a rivers under the cracked and dry waiting to burst forth.