Mule & Plow: Being Church

You’ll be the mule; I’ll be the plow.

Come harvest time, we’ll work it out.

There’s still a lot of love

here in these troubled fields.

Singing the pain, sorrow and hope of hard times in the farm lands, Nanci Griffith speaks into the soul of despair and in their singing, somehow reshape the darkness into light.

Reshaping the darkness into light: that, I think, is the principal ‘job’ of the Christian.

It’s not Pollyanna.  There’s no call for Hallmark here.

What there is is the belief, surely based on past experience, that together is the tipping point, if not the answer.

Fundamentally, that’s what church is: a together enterprise.

Far from perfect, shoot, we’re often not even friends.

But what we are is not alone.

What we are is together, mule and plow – plow and mule.

What we are is stepping out of darkness into the hope of love – there, where the light lives.