But it was not such an afternoon—for our family of farmers, few afternoons were. My dad threw the truck in park, and at just four years old, I knew this stop was important enough for me to jump out and tramp across the field behind him. He knelt alongside a row of hay he’d recently cut and felt the fallen alfalfa with his hands. Then he looked at the sky, pondering the weather that could either bless or curse his work.

It was a moment that showed me the spirituality of living close to the land, where the beauty of God’s creation, the risk of hardship, and the work that binds them together are always close at hand. This is a life familiar to generations of God’s people, including most of the Bible’s first hearers. Jesus spoke to crowds of farmers, people who could easily make sense of his parables of seeds and fields and failing crops. But this experience of faith lived close to the land, which I grew up with, is slipping away in our country today.

America drew its earliest economic strength from the natural resources of this vast land, but we are no longer a nation of farmers. From a height of nearly 6.5 million family farms, the United States has fewer than 2 million—often losing them at the rate of tens of thousands per year nationwide, according to federal data. In my home state of Wisconsin, we’re losing as many as three farms per day. 

And closing or consolidating farms aren’t the only changes coming to America. Ranches and forests are falling to urban development and economic decline, and our population is steadily urbanizing, shifting from nearly 60 percent rural in the 1940s to just 14 percent rural in 2020.

This is not a culturally and spiritually neutral economic shift. For many of us, loss of life close to the land means loss of regular encounters with God’s creation. It means we are more likely to see the world God made on a small and merely recreational scale: in a tame public park instead of a woodland wild with life or a field furrowed with crops to come. 

The spiritual effects may be most measurable in rural areas—where addiction is rampant and we see rising deaths of despair—but I see a connection too between this loss and our larger mental health crisis, as well as the deep political divisions between rural and urban Americans.

I also know my own faith would look very different were it not farm grown. When my dad crouched in that field, he was trying to decide how soon the hay would be dry enough to bale. And when he looked up at the sky, he was trying to decide how much time he might have to do it before the rain came. It was a moment of economic decision-making, but it was also inextricable from his connection to creation and our Creator.

This and countless other moments shaped my faith. I grew up Catholic, though our family also attended nondenominational churches at various times. But whatever our church home, I had constant lessons in faith on our land. 

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As a kid, I was sure my dad could divine the weather. This is laughable to any grown farmer, but it led me to pay attention—to see, like the psalmist, God’s work in the water, clouds, and thunder (Psalm 77:16–19). Working sunup to sundown with my dad was a kind of discipleship, training me in diligence, determination, and dedication. Seeing seeds planted in the spring sprout as alfalfa and corn showed me God’s miracles every harvest. Living with animals taught me that the circle of life—from newborn calves taking their first breath, to dear old dogs taking their last—can point our eyes toward heaven if we let it. 

My faith was both tested and confirmed on the farm when I was 14. One morning, my dad woke up to severe bleeding. Operations to address what we thought were digestive issues later turned up cancer. 

With my dad sick and undergoing treatment, I rose every morning before the sun. Working alongside a family friend who came to milk our cows and perform the tasks a boy of 14 couldn’t do on his own, I prepared the cows and equipment for milking, cleaned their udders, and helped milk when I got far enough ahead. Then I’d do all the other chores: feeding the livestock, cleaning the barn, leaping from the tractor to the ground and back for one job after another. I’d be back at it in the evening, with school in between.

Along the way, friends from church were the hands of Christ to our family. They dropped off meals, told me what a blessing my work was to my father when they saw the fear and fatigue in my eyes, and rang from house to house with prayer chains. On and on, they taught me a lesson about prayer that has stuck ever since, through times of waxing and waning faith alike. And one day, my dad came back. 

These days, I split my time between my family’s farm in Wisconsin and northern California, where my wife’s family lives. I know most people will never become farmers, and though a plurality of Americans say they’d prefer to live in a rural area, they may not be able to move there. 

But that doesn’t mean we must be cut off from the land and its revelation of God as Creator. We can teach our children where their food comes from and introduce them to creation in America’s remaining farmland, rural communities, and outdoor places.

My wife and I had a little girl earlier this year. She’s a happy baby who, I’m grateful to say, seems to take after her mother, with watchful eyes and a ready smile. I think a lot about how to teach her what she’ll need to know—about God, about the world, about how to live—and how much she’ll learn rumbling over her grandpa’s fields in a pickup truck.

Brian Reisinger grew up working with his father from the time he could walk. He is the author of Land Rich, Cash Poor and can be found at brian-reisinger.com.

This article is partially adapted from Brian Reisinger’s book, Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.

The post Faith Lived Close to the Land appeared first on Christianity Today.

The moment falls in late November, opening weekend of gun deer hunting in my native Wisconsin. Dressed in heavy clothing against the harsh cold, striding to the deer stand through the early morning darkness, I carry my rifle in careful wonder at what I’ll see. 

Sometimes, as I reach my stand, there’s fog lingering even as soft gray light appears over the treetops. Other times it’s clear, and the great valley where my family and I hunt materializes before me all at once, with its gently rolling fields and curving wood line. Always the air is cold and clean, biting my face and creeping beneath my heavy coat, freshening my lungs and quieting my thoughts.

It’s here, in the high seat of my deer stand overlooking the past year, that I find those lost things—loved ones gone, feelings I’ve forgotten or lacked the courage to name, a sense of self known only to God and me. This time isn’t simply about finding a trophy deer. It’s about finding joy, pain, and renewal. My usual world is a whirlwind, but out in the woods I can hear God’s “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–12, KJV).

As our country has become more divided, participation in hunting has declined, and I find critics tend to envision a reckless blood sport, not realizing the care and consideration a good hunter brings to the woods. I grew up with deer hunting as an honored tradition, one where we learned about respecting the animal with an ethical hunt, honoring our natural environment, and carrying on a way of life where faith is found in living close to the land. 

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My main memories of deer hunting are about my grandpa on my mom’s side, Roman Ripp, hunting on land that was in our family thanks to my grandpa on my dad’s side, Albert Reisinger.

Grandpa Ripp is almost mythical in my memories—smiling broadly, singing songs in idle moments, and telling big-buck stories over his morning coffee with the flair of a classic American showman. He wore bright red hunting pants and an old-fashioned hunting hat with ear flaps, jauntily tipped atop his head. I still marvel at his sharpshooter’s aim.

He may as well have been Buffalo Bill Cody to me, and the setting for his adventures—and those of my dad, my uncle, and eventually me and my sister and friends—could not have been more sacred. It was the rolling Wisconsin farmland where I grew up, which my Grandpa Albert had worked since he was a child, climbing out of the Depression into the middle class so that my dad and mom could farm it with us.

Not long after I was old enough to carry on the tradition, Grandpa Ripp declared himself too old to handle the hardship of another winter deer hunt. He passed his stand to me, and I hunted it each year, carefully harvesting deer when I got the chance, missing enough to leave me wondering if I would ever shoot and track and regale others with stories as he had. When I graduated high school—excited to pursue a writing career, worried I was letting my dad down by not farming—Grandpa Ripp became an important mentor, introducing me to a newspaper editor who became my first boss.

One year, the chance came to make him proud. In the early morning light, a buck stepped out from the tree line. He was so big I swore I could see the fog of his breath mingling with mine, though he was much too far away for that—and maybe too far for a young hunter like me to reach.

I got him. That deer was my first truly triumphant moment at my grandpa’s deer stand, but also my last great moment with my grandpa. He had been slipping for a few months. I brought the antlers to his assisted living apartment in town, expecting he’d leap to his feet like always to greet me at the door, hear my story, and tell it back to me as if it were one of his own.

Instead, I saw just how far gone he was. His face lit up, but he couldn’t rise from his chair. And though I told him the story as many times as he wanted, he couldn’t repeat it back to me, let alone add his own visions of it to help me treasure the memory. We took a picture to preserve the best of the moment, and I left.

Grandpa lived several months longer, and he and Grandma Ripp moved out to the farm for their final care, where I drove out to see them each week. But his memory—the happy times, and his decline—became so tied to the annual deer hunt that it took many years in the deer stand I’d inherited to process our loss. 

It was only in my deer stand, in the dark slowly becoming light, that I could really think of him. There, the distractions of the world fell away. The things I told myself all year about how I was doing could finally be separated, wheat from chaff, to see the truth. I learned to pray about things I hadn’t realized were weighing on my heart.

God is never “far from any one of us,” of course, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28). But in the stillness of the deer stand, his presence is more noticeable for me. Prayer comes more easily. Surrounded by God’s creation, I remember to say with the psalmist:

All creatures look to you
    to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
    they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
    they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
    they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
    they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
    they are created,
    and you renew the face of the ground. (Ps. 104:27–30)

I remember to meditate on God’s work in the world and in my own life. Since that moment with Grandpa Ripp, hunting seasons have come with both triumph and defeat—not only in pursuit of the next buck but also in moves across the country, career defeats, relationships lost and gained, and the grief that has come with the passing of our remaining grandparents and other loved ones.

I’ve also been able to pass on the tradition, to introduce a new generation to the stillness of the deer stand. My 15-year-old nephew has already harvested as many big bucks as the adults who hunt on our land. My two younger nephews have watched me harvest deer for years, and this year they get to try it themselves for the first time. And my wife and I have a daughter, our first child of just 9 months—old enough to appear in big-buck photos with her daddy that she’ll see years from now, if I’m fortunate enough to live out another legend this year.

But no matter what I see, as the dark turns to light, I’ll know I’m where I need to be: with God, honoring his creation, finding those things lost. And those things yet to come.

Brian Reisinger is a writer and the author of Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. He can be found at brian-reisinger.com and @BrianJReisinger.

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