Five Steps Toward Agrarianism

"I'm small and it's God who makes the sun rise, the moon spin, the springs froth, the rain pelt, the mountains quake, the oceans surge, the deserts spread, the wind rake, and the snow to muffle. Not me. God."
That's the testimony of the Psalmist and all the other Old Testament saints.
But we have an inflated view of our importance and a diminished view of God's involvement. This leads to all manner of folly and harmful mischief.
When it comes to our environment, right living is a great aid to right thinking. The Bible assumes at least an agrarian awareness in its audience, if not an agrarian existence. The Jewish liturgical calendar is remarkably agrarian. The imagery and metaphor of Scripture is predominately agrarian. The curse in Genesis is agrarian and the depictions even of the New Jerusalem in Revelation have an agrarian dimension.
So here are five suggestions that even urban people might act on in an effort to get into our right minds.

1. Follow the Moon
     If someone asked, would you be able to say what phase the moon is in today? Is it waxing or waning? To know requires the discipline of stepping outside in the dark to scan the sky, and that alone would be reason enough. We do far too little stepping outside in the dark and looking up.

2.  Take a Constitutional
     My grandmother was fond of taking a walk after a meal. It was very Victorian and quaint, but it served a valuable purpose beyond helping to digest one's food. Nature is obscured in direct observation, but reveals itself in the sidelong glance. If you would know creation well it's no good making a point of looking out the window or reading books on the topic. There is no substitute for strolling, for aimless walking.
     Honestly, when was the last time you walked beneath the trees with no haste and no object?

3. Keep a weather journal.
    My friend has a journal in his milking parlor. His grandfather kept a similar journal, containing notes about the weather mixed with observations about the goodness and majesty of God. There is something about accepting today's weather and jotting it down, whether with glee or resignation, that takes from tomorrow the power to distress.  Knowing what happened a day ago and a year ago makes me much less anxious about what will happen a year from now.

4. Experience extremes of weather
    If the wind never ruins your umbrellas, if the rain never soaks you, if the sun never warms you to the touch, if your return from the snow storm never means booby traps of icy puddles for your family to discover with their stocking feet you are soft and experientially impoverished.

5. Celebrate extremes of weather
     When confronted with weather extremes people are most likely to cry for legislation, but there is another, more legitimate response. When trees come down cry "Glory." When the thermometer rises cry "Glory." The wild variability of nature is not something of which we are guilty and it's not something we're responsible for fixing. It is a pointed reminder that our God is great, big, and thrilling. Let him thrill you and applaud him when he does.