Thursday was one of those rare days in Nebraska. No wind. No breeze. Nothing. Driving to and from a district pastor’s meeting in Geneva, I’d see these moving columns of dust that just went straight up into the clear blue sky. I knew that somewhere in there was a green, red, yellow or slightly orange combine chewing up a field of soybeans. Trucks or Semis were lined up at the end of the field. And harvest was rollin’! In the morning that field was gray/brown and fuzzy. By afternoon, it was shaved low to the ground and naked.
I don’t care how good the air-conditioning or how tight those seals are on those combine cabs. Those drivers had to have felt like dust magnets. No matter how fast you go, on days like that, you are the dust cloud maker. Its a job that’s done from the inside-out. You are at one with the dust; a living, walking “Pig Pen” from a Charlie Brown cartoon. And you don’t want to hear anything more about how the bible says, “From dust you came, and to dust you will return.”
By nightfall that day, the dust from combines in bean fields and trucks on gravel roads had settled and spread into low-lying areas as a moistureless fog. The next day, that dust would be recycled and boosted with gusts of wind. And a small percentage of Nebraska would now be Kansas.
It is impossible to live life without dust. Part of me would love for everything to be clean and neat all the time. But that’s just not possible. If you’re going to harvest beans, dust happens. You can’t have one without the other. The dust is a well known marker that harvest has begun.
Thank you God for the harvest and all that goes with it. May our equipment operators be safe as they bring the crops in. And thank you God, even for the dust.
Grace & Peace,
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