Plows like people

When I was young, my granddad had an old horse drawn plow. Just an old farming tool, bent and twisted from a lifetime of honest service. It was rusted and broken to the point of being unrecognizable. Yet It fascinated me.

Sometimes I feel like that plow - as if life has bent and twisted me, making me almost a mystery to myself. But that is not as bad, as bad things go. I learned that from the plow. A plow is broken down by plowing. Doing what it was created to do results in it being unrecognizable.

But that is not how we begin. Such change dose not happen in a moment but over a lifetime. When we start out our heads are filled with possibility and dreams often only the fruit of a delinquent heart. Yet such misguided wishes never die easy. In time what one knows of hopes and dreams; what was thought of as life and future; the pleasant dreams of youth, are slowly sanded away till all that remains is a smooth simple hope, uncluttered and fixed.

Plows - like people - have scars.  Life is hard like fallow ground. It can be cruel and unforgiving. The process will warp and change you, scrap and scar you, but that is just part of living.  All the scars, the unrecognizable brokenness, when traced out tell a story. A story not defined by how it ends but by the whole of a life. You don't measure a plow by its weathered and haggard exterior but by the story its scars have to tell. They bear witness to a lifetime of showing up, digging in and doing what it was created to do. Every ding, every scratch taken as a whole tells of a graced and messy perseverance. A story of fallow ground broken in a long obedience in the same direction. A journey marked by many little deaths and littered with the tomb stones of abandoned dreams.

But what is the secret of the plow? I think I heard the wind whisper an answer.  A plow unlike people knows it is loved no mater how twisted life makes it. For only a love that embraces the unloveable can open us up to live from the uncluttered acceptance of brokenness. Such love is freedom. It frees us to live unburdened from the unbearable weight of needing to be anything more than what we are. Even if we has been sharpened at the edges by the endless grind of life.

In the end, the plow was twisted and used up but maybe that's what fulfillment feels like sometimes. When you feel spent and poured out. Is that the splendor of being used? I think so. What gets us to the end is not the wishful thinking of one’s youth but a fix hope in God perfected over the long journey. When dreams die, and youthful hopes fade what remains is an unflinching hope, enriched by love, and built on the perseverance of the plow.