The Kingdom Land (33 page)

“
You can only take one step at a
time,” Henry reminded him. “It's too early to know how your vision
will turn out so don't turn your back on Him. No matter how your
eyes turn out, you can't shut Him out. Don't start thinking about
the future. Think about what is going to happen this
week.”

“
I don't even know what's going to
happen this week. Sure, I'll let them cut into my eyes, but what
will that accomplish? See, I was just about to take the first real
step that meant something new in my life, and you say take one
step. How can you take a step if you aren't going
anywhere?”

“
Erik, I'm not good like John at
explaining things, but I do know the Word of God, and I do know
Him. I know that He has been true to your aunt and me all our
lives. There've been times when I just couldn't figure things out,
but He has always been true.

“
I don't know if you even remember,
but there was a time in my life when I thought all my dreams for
the farm had ended. You were only thirteen so maybe you didn't even
know what had happened.

“
Your aunt and I had just put a
third mortgage on the farm to buy the 200 acres from the Hylands. I
had to plead with the bank to get the money, but I knew that land
was good and our farm was just too small at the time to survive. I
felt I needed to trust the Lord to keep the farm. By the end of the
first year I thought I was a genius and it was clear to me that the
Lord had been with the purchase. That year the crops were
great.

“
They were more than great. They
were the best I ever saw; at least seventy-five bushels per acre. I
had taken the chance and planted barley and the samples showed it
would be malting barley rather than feed barley, so the price for
that grain would be five times normal. I thanked God every day as I
walked through those fields and saw the harvest become ready. The
barley was so heavy it lodged over on itself; the heads were so
full of kernels that the stems couldn't hold them
straight.

“
I couldn't believe that the Lord
had opened up buying that land just in time for the best harvest
ever. It was great. I knew He was great.” Henry paused,
remembering.

“
Then came the first day of harvest.
I'll never forget that day. I had just pulled the combine into the
first field, the forty acres straight east of the house. It was a
great feeling to see the reel of the combine pulling in that
barley. I could almost see myself handing the check to the banker
and telling him how great my God was.

“
Late the same afternoon I glanced
towards the west. Some clouds were starting to build. They weren't
the normal clouds. They were tall and they were topped with white.
I had seen those clouds before. They were hail clouds. The
weatherman hadn't said anything about a storm, but I could see the
clouds getting bigger and bigger and closer and closer.

“
My first instinct was to stop the
combine and cry and then to pray. But there was no time to stop. I
needed that harvest. So I prayed out loud while the combine worked.
I tried to make the combine go faster, but the machine could only
handle the thick grain so fast. I could only go at a crawl while
the storm looked like it was on a locomotive. I prayed that the
Lord would steer the storm north or south or anywhere but here. As
the clouds came dead on towards me, I prayed that the Lord would
change the hailstones to drops of rain.

“
But those clouds didn't stop. They
seemed only to build in size and speed. Within an hour they hit the
field I was working. It sounded like machine gun fire was hitting
that combine when the storm hit with its hailstones. The fields
right in front of me that stood so tall with grain was flat to the
ground in minutes. The hail stones were so big they left pit marks
on the sides of the red combine. Until I sold that combine I was
reminded of that storm.

“
Those stones left nothing of the
crops. The heads were so full they were knocked free of all their
kernels. And it wasn't just the forty acres I was working on. It
wiped out all the fields on the main farm. The only crops the storm
missed were the two hundred acres of the Hyland's farm that was
separated from ours.

“
I guess I should have thanked the
Lord that He gave me the one piece of land that was spared, but I
wasn't in the mood for thanks. It seemed to be that land and its
mortgage might cost me the whole farm. Those two hundred acres
wouldn't pay the mortgage or seeds for next year or even hardly
enough to put food on the table.

“
In two hours time I had gone from
the excitement of the harvest to despair that the harvest now lay
useless on the ground. I thought my life had ended ‘cause I thought
I had lost the farm. I thought the land I worked for years would be
taken over by the banks with that third mortgage. I had trusted the
Lord and it seemed like the Lord hadn't answered my
prayers.

“
I thought I was going to die, but a
funny thing happened. I didn't. I didn't lose the farm, and my life
didn't come to an end. Things were tight for a long time, but the
Lord took us through it and He protected our lives. He was true.
The hail destroyed the harvest, but it couldn't destroy our lives
unless we let it.

“
I remember going to talk to Pastor
Griffith. I'm not sure if you remember him, but he was a great man.
I told him about my problems and asked him to pray for me that the
Lord would miraculously provide me with money. He said he would be
glad to, but then he asked me a strange question. He asked me where
I would be a thousand years from then. Of course, I said “with my
Lord in heaven.” He told me not to forget that. He wanted to remind
me that today is important, but we also need to remember that the
conclusion of today is not the conclusion of our life. He reminded
me that Scripture said of Jesus that He knew where He came from and
He knew where He was going. It was because of Him knowing His final
destiny that He could live through the crisis of the
day.”

It was unusual for Henry to give such a long story,
but today was an unusual day. Erik did remember that time for a
different reason. Usually, when they would all go to town, the
Coopers would give Erik $2.00 to spend on candy and then they would
go to the Point Drive-In for lunch. After that storm there would be
no $2.00 and there wasn't enough money to even buy a Coke from the
Point. Times were tough. Erik just didn't realize why at the
time.

Erik could have felt insulted that a simple destroyed
crop could be compared to his destroyed life. Erik knew better. He
knew Uncle Henry's farm was his life, and to lose it would mean the
end to his dreams, just as sight was the end to Erik's. But too
much had happened the last two days for a nice story to make a
difference. It was like listening to the old men talk about the old
revivals. They were great stories, but they just didn't change
today. Besides, his uncle had his wife to help support him while
Erik had no one. Erik didn't know if he had the grit of Uncle
Henry.

Someday that story of the hailstorm would be
important for Erik to remember, but today's sorrow closed his heart
and ears.

“
Anyway, Erik, you're talking like
you'll never have a chance again. If you want to show you can do
something, show you've got the guts to still make those dreams come
true. You don't know how your eyes will come out. Neither do I. He
does. Your life is far from over with or without your eyes if you
don't hide from Him. You need to see His hand in your
life.”

“
It just doesn't make sense to me,”
Erik replied when it was obvious Henry had finished. “God shouldn't
let this happen. You picked a funny choice of words when you said
that I needed to “see” God's hand. That's the problem. I don't know
if I will be able to see and what I see of Him seems so different.
This isn't the God I've read about in the Bible or that I've seen
in my life. He doesn't take people's eyes and make them go blind.
Why did He let this happen?” Erik asked for the fifth time that day
without an answer.

“
I don't know, Erik. I've asked that
myself, not only about your eyes, but at other times when things
like that storm happened. I don't have an answer.”

“
Neither do I. Neither do I,” Erik
almost mourned as he turned again to his image imprisoned in the
windowed scene.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-One

 

 

“B
less the
Lord, O my soul

And all that is within me. Bless His

Holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul

And forget none of His benefits.

Who pardons all your iniquities?

Who heals all your diseases;

Who redeems your life from the pit;

Who crowns you with loving kindness

And compassion

So that your youth is renewed like the eagles.”

 

Erik kept reading those words of Psalm 103. How
foreign they sounded. At the same time, how much he needed them to
be true. He knew the truth of the Bible, but now he didn't know how
it all worked out in the world he lived.

“
The Lord …heals, redeems, satisfies
your years, and renews your youth.” Those words hung with him, not
as a comfort, but as a presence that neither healed him nor allowed
him to forget. If he was to believe the Bible, indeed believe God,
he needed to deal with those words.

He had gone to church that Sunday. He had been prayed
over and anointed with oil, but there was no change in his
eyesight. Now he had to deal with the reality of surgery, a reality
he neither wanted nor trusted. He wanted someone to shake his
shoulders and tell him that he didn't need to do it. He wanted them
to say a medicine was found, or that the Lord would still be a
healer, but no one would. Not even John had any simple answers.
They all advised him to have the surgery. They said God could work
through surgery. To Erik, this seemed like a cop-out.

The thought of even needing a
surgery was too much for him to comprehend.
Why when everything is
ahead of me
would of God let this happen?
There would
also be tests to see if he was a diabetic and that, if positive,
could mean other complications. Somehow, God had not dealt with
what was before Erik, and it left Erik feeling as if he had to deal
with it alone.

Erik wasn't being a coward. It wasn't the knife of
surgery that bothered him. It was the fact that he once again
seemed alone. There is no such thing as a coward or a hero. The
only difference between the two is the hero is able to look beyond
what is before him. Erik had dreamt too much in his life to look
beyond this. He had seen too many dreams vanish and now the outcome
seemed too final. He had decided to go ahead with the surgery, but
it was a decision from unwillingness to fight rather than from
bravery.

 

“
Erik, can I talk to
you?”

Erik jumped; as he was unaware anyone was in the
bunkhouse. John came in without knocking.

“
Sure, come on in.”

“
I heard you decided to have the
surgery Friday.”

“
Yeah, they didn't give me much of a
choice. Crazy situation, isn't it? Don't know what to do
now.”

“
I wish I could give you some good
suggestions, but I don't have any,” John admitted.

“
I sure wish you did. I wish someone
did. Before you told me my parents found themselves in their
hopelessness because they never turned their lives over to Christ.
Well, here I am, a full-fledged child of God, flat on my
back.”

“
Doesn't make sense, I know,
Erik.”

“
You're telling me. You're the man
with all the answers. What are they?”

“
I don't have any answers. I know
what's happened doesn't make any sense at all. Unfortunately I also
know that things like this will happen again. What are your
answers, Erik?”

“
My answer, huh. I'm the one asking,
not answering.”

“
But you're the only one who can
answer, Erik. You're the one it's happening to, and you're the one
living with the consequences. You know God well enough. What is
your answer?”

“
I think I've got to question. It
looks like a lot of those things in the Bible don't work out in
real life.”

“
Like what?”

“
Like, how does Christ touch our
physical lives with healing? Sure, I've been healed before with
things like headaches and colds and sniffles, but the biggies… Why
can't I be healed now? Is God too uninterested or too weak to do
the big ones? Or is there something wrong with me? There are other
people in church in wheelchairs. Why aren't they
healed?”

“
I don't know, Erik. I do know it
has nothing to do with God's bigness or His lack of love for you. I
probably won't understand until I get to heaven and then I have a
lot of questions. But then somehow I think those questions won't be
that important. Those people will be too busy dancing and shouting
for joy without wheelchairs. But you know that's not the real
question. He could heal every wheel chaired person and your eyes,
and that wouldn't be the real question or answer. The only question
is if He loves you today. Does He love you enough that He cries
with your pain and at the same time is He big enough to still make
a future for you, healed or unhealed? If God can't touch your life
today, healing is the least of your concerns. What do you think?
Does He still care? Have you given up on Him?”