When our children were little, my mother served as pastor of the Presbyterian church in Cottonwood Falls. We lived just three miles away from our little motel along Highway 50 in Strong City. Every Sunday morning, our drive to church took us through the rich bottomland of the Cottonwood River.
The fields changed with the seasons. Some years they held corn. Other years soybeans. But my favorite was always the wheat. Driving that same stretch of road every Sunday morning, we became quiet witnesses to a miracle unfolding one week at a time.
Week after week we watched the first green shoots emerge in the spring. As the days grew warmer, the wheat stretched higher while an occasional stalk of volunteer corn, left from the previous year’s crop, poked up among it. By early summer, the fields had transformed from brilliant green to waves of amber that shimmered in the Kansas wind.
Then, almost overnight, harvest arrived.
Combines rolled through the fields from sunrise until well after sunset, leaving behind neat rows of stubble, clouds of dust, and the unmistakable smell of fresh-cut wheat drifting through the air.
Just down the road stood the grain elevator beside the railroad tracks in Strong City. Truck after truck unloaded wheat harvested from fields throughout the surrounding countryside. Once those kernels were poured together into the elevator, there was no separating them again. Grain from many fields became one harvest.
During college, I spent a summer working for a commodity grain company in Kansas City, processing shipment orders from grain elevators like the one in Strong City. It was there I discovered that Kansas wheat doesn’t stay in Kansas. It is milled into flour and shipped around the world. A loaf of bread served halfway across the globe may well have begun as wheat growing in one of those fields between Strong City and Cottonwood Falls.
That image has stayed with me.
Every Sunday, God gathers us from different homes, different neighborhoods, different backgrounds, and different experiences. We arrive carrying our own stories, our own joys, and our own burdens. Yet, in Christ, we become part of something much larger than ourselves. Like grain gathered from many fields, we are joined with one another and with faithful people in churches throughout Wichita, across Kansas, and around the world.
Grain isn’t gathered simply to fill an elevator. It is gathered to become bread.
In the same way, God gathers us not simply to sit together in the same pews, but to become nourishment for a hungry world. May we give thanks for the harvest God is gathering among us, and may we be willing to become part of the bread that Christ is breaking for the life of the world.
See you in church!
Peace, Love, and Grace,
Pastor Kevin
