I have never been more motivated for a solo road-trip in my life as I was last Friday morning at 5:45am. I drove south through Detroit the sun was just rising, barely missing the morning traffic. I was headed home to Winget Farm the place of my barefooted childhood and the place of my dreams. Truthfully its just a piece of land but it holds just shy of four Winget generations worth of memories and history so the 12 hour trip alone in my truck didn’t feel so bad (although my back started aching about hour 7).
The timing of my trip home was perfect. There was hay in the pasture that needed to be baled. This is what we refer to as an “all hands on deck” job. Hay is a tricky business because you have to time it just right with the weather. Once the hay is cut it needs a few days to dry and then it must be raked in to rows with a machine pulled behind the tractor and then baled with either a round or square baler. Round bales are big and must be moved with a tractor but square bales weigh about 40lbs and must be pulled out of the pasture by hand. The technique here is hooking a truck or tractor up to a large trailer and driving it around the pasture slow enough to walk along beside it and toss up the hay bails to someone who is stacking them neatly on the trailer. Sounds easy enough until you have about 200 or more that need to be pulled out of the pasture that day because if they’re rained on then they’re no good! Its quite a workout and a challenge!
The Winget family has been baling hay for generations and not much has changed. We try to sell a few hundred bales to have a little farm revenue but none of us are out here because of the money. Everyone in my family works full time and has other interests and things to do with their time but despite all of that we all take time for hay. We endure the occasional sunburn or hay rash and we all agree that a mowed pasture and a couple hundred bales packed tightly in a barn has a particular beauty to it.
I love the rhythm of life; the changing of seasons, the work and the rest. The evenings spent on the porch with my family and the days spent sweating replacing fence posts and split rails. Putting hay up in the barn reminds me of that rhythm that God designed that ultimately points back to Him and the perfection of His timing…both in nature and in my circumstances.
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven” says the first verse of Ecclesiastes chapter 3. It goes on to say “What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil- this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere Him.“
May all things bring our hearts back to reverence for our Creator.
