Loving the Prairie

This is my Father's world

The birds their carols raise

The morning light

The lily white

Declare their Maker's praise.

This is my Father's world!

He shines in all that's fair

In the rustling grass

I hear Him pass

He speaks to me everywhere!

   

I love our new place. I never thought I would love the prairie, but I truly do.


    To tell the truth, I rather dreaded moving from a town to a more country-ish area. I’ve grown up in towns. In a town, whatever you want is always close. Your neighbors are all right squished up against you; Safeway is right down the road; you can walk to the library. It’s reassuring to know that you are never from help, friends, or comfort.

    In a town, the houses are coldly quiet, staring disapprovingly at you as you walk past. The roads are lifeless black asphalt that is starkly unchanging no matter how far you travel on it. Gardens are well-behaved patches of subdued colors.
People walk only on the sidewalks, because that is the only place to walk. At night the only sound is the gentle, persistent hum of cars in the distance, mingled sometimes with the neighbors’ loud party music.

    When you are more in the country, you can look out your window, and, instead of seeing houses, streets, and cars all over everything, you can actually see. The sky is bigger and bluer out here. The grass is longer. The birds fly higher and sing sweeter. The roads are dirt roads that change with the seasons, roads that you have to fight sometimes, but are generally good-natured. When you go out, you take higher steps than maybe you would somewhere else because you have to step over the tall, stiff weeds that grab at your ankles, and if you are barefoot, you have to watch for the cactus that cunningly blend in with the ground. Sometimes you will walk on the dirt road, and you can feel the gentle firmness of the bending, dipping path under your feet. You have to watch for the dogs that might come rushing out at you, because there are few fences out here. Most of them are friendly, but some are hard-bitten fighters. It smells different than a town out here: earthy and fresh, with the rich odor of livestock mingled in. You can see the hills out your window, sometimes spotted with cows and sometimes covered in snow but always there. The wind never lets up out here; sometimes it’s a gentle, quiet zephyr that just wants to play, but other times it turns into a roaring, shrieking, furious beast that snatches roughly at your hair and batters mercilessly at your house, trying relentlessly to get inside. You can hear it whistle mournfully through your window at night sometimes; but sometimes there is nothing but the lively, friendly silence of the prairie, the kind of silence that is made of rustlings in the long grass and stealthy footsteps of elusive creatures.

     We are not really completely in the country yet, I suppose. We still are in a bit of a neighborhood. It is a nice balance, I guess, but the more I see of the prairie, the more I fall in love with the lonely, lively beauty of the place. Although I do love to be around people and I would never want to be cut off from my friends, I am beginning to understand how Charles Ingalls felt when he said, “When you can see the smoke from your neighbor’s chimney, it’s time to move on.”

     I think that is why my new favorite hymn is This is My Father’s World. I love to look out at the amber waves of grain, to borrow a phrase, and rest me in the thought that His hand these wonders wrought! My goodness, anyone who can create a prairie and send the wind shrieking through the grass deserves more glory than it is possible to imagine! We serve a truly awesome and wonderful God!

Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!

Praise ye the Lord!

Psalm 150:6