A Grain of Wheat

The Grain Falls and Dies

'The Farmer comes in from the barn, leaves a bucket from the henhouse at the back door with his boots. I can hear him washing up at the mudroom's porcelain sink. He steps into the kitchen. I look up from the dishes. He's seen it already. The man can read my eyes better than he reads the skies. Sometimes all our unspoken broken speaks louder than anything we could ever say. He reads my slow breaking over the kid's lightning bolt news and all my not-enoughness that I can't even grope through the pain to find words for. 

He pulls me into himself, enfolds me. And then, into the quiet, he says it so soft I almost miss it, what I have held on to more than a thousand times since.

"You know-- everything all across this farm says the same thing, you know that, right?" He waits till I let him look me in the eye, let him look into me and all this fracturing. "The seed breaks to give us the wheat. The soil breaks to give us the crop, the sky breaks to give us the rain, the wheat breaks to give us the bread. And the bread breaks to give us the feast. There was once even an alabaster jar that broke to give him all the glory."

He looks right through the cracks of me. He smells of the barn and the dirt and the sky, and he's carrying something of the maple trees at the edge of the woods-- carrying old light. He says it slowly, like he meanst it: "Never be afraid of being a broken thing."'

~ Ann Voskamp

Did you see this short meditation a couple days ago in the Magnificat? 

It struck me so strongly!