I spent the afternoon yesterday with a friend of mine who is a wheat farmer. It was quite amazing seeing wheat harvested for the very first time in my life. I hit the road shortly before noon on my way to Omega, about 15 miles west of Kingfisher. It was a quiet drive, nice, with spotted puffy white clouds in the sky. I felt peaceful, at ease, calm.
Pulling up to the wheat field, next to his big semi-truck and trailer, I felt pretty small. I got out of my car and climbed up onto his trailer. He had already dumped one load out of the combine into the trailer, so I immediately figured out that what I had thought was being harvested off of the stalks was not the actual product. (I felt pretty ignorant not even knowing which part of the stalk gets harvested, but he was very gracious in the passing on of his knowledge.) I almost felt like a little kid getting to climb all over this big semi-truck. Jeff was in the field harvesting; I could see him not far away. I'm sure he could see me climbing on his truck like a little kid on a new playground. I have to say, it almost felt like that honestly.
As he pulled the combine up next to the truck and started dumping a new load of grain, I felt the hugeness of the combine, even dwarfing the semi-trailer to some degree. As he finished dumping the grain, he welcomed me to his field, his "payday" as he put it. We jumped in the combine and took off. It was amazing, and quite weird, sitting right above the reel (which I called a sickle blade), surrounded by glass on three sides, one of which looked like you could fall right out of down in to the auger assembly. He made sure to tell me not to lean on the front glass, there was no way he could stop that auger before I entered the shoot. It would not have been healthy.
I felt like a kid in junior high as he began to tell me about the field and the grain and the equipment. I was soaking in this experience, not because it was so exciting, but because it was part of so many people's lives, including my friend Jeff. In fact, it was his life and always had been. It was his dad's life before his. Truth be told, it was exciting in it's own way. Jeff was passing on knowledge to me. He was passing on life to me, and he was passing on love to me. He was taking what he knew and sharing it with a friend. He was sharing his life in a way that he didn't often get to.
Towards the end of the day, we pulled the combine up to the truck to unload one last load to take to the elevator and then hauled it off. When we got back to the field, we just spent a few minutes walking through the field. Jeff reminded me of the story of Jesus and his followers in Luke 6:1"One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels." So, Jeff showed me hot to pull off some of the heads of the stalks and grind them in my hand so that I could sift the chaff through my fingers. He then convinced me to try the kernels of wheat, just like Jesus' disciples ate. It was kind of weird at first, but as I tried them and started chewing, I realized that it was really not bad. It was more like a weird texture of wood/nut and tasted like wheat flour and a little nutty as well.
We talked about how cool it was to experience the Bible in this way. Don't get me wrong, this was no eye-opening, WOW, experience, however it was one of those experiences I will never forget, simply because I was able to realize, and walk in and participate in the path of Jesus for but just a glimpse of time.
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