The Heart of the Farmer

By Kurt Mahler
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02/02/2025
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Listen to Kurt read the essay.

“He who yokes the practice of the virtues to spiritual knowledge is a skillful farmer, watering the fields of his soul,” wrote Theodoros the Great Ascetic.1 By this we see that all of us can be farmers in spirit. 

Most of us do not directly work with the soil for a living, yet all of us depend on those who do. Your trip to Aldi’s would yield nothing without them.

In the same way, we risk yielding nothing unless we incorporate practices parallel to those of the farmer. It is a mindset that transfers to even the most urban and air-conditioned environments: habits producing a harvest if we don’t give up.

Now, let’s clear away a misconception before we dive in. The farmer is not altruistic. He works for what he can get out of it himself, and it is right that he should. “The farmer who does the work should be the first to eat of the produce.” (2 Tim 2:6) Paul quotes this proverb to Timothy because it taps into his apprentice’s natural motivations. We are wired for reward, and this is good. It is not a win/lose proposition. It is a win/win. The farmer wins and all who enjoy his produce win as well.

With that as a given, what is the mindset of the farmer? 

The farmer

  • values the pain of delay
  • recognizes right timing
  • understands the power of “small”

The Farmer and the Pain of Delay

Half of farming is waiting. This is not to say he is doing nothing, rather, the farmer pursues one task while waiting for the right timing of the other.

When we wait to do a thing we want to do or when we bear with a thing we would rather not bear, it is the same virtue: patience. And what is patience but accepting the pain of the delay of the fulfillment of our desires?

Self-denial and self-discipline might not be the things we burn to possess. They are not the values our culture celebrates as a key to success. And yet self-control is the very thing we search for in others if we are going to trust them. We cannot escape this reality: If we are patient, we will acquire what we labor for. If we are not, we will lose it. If we are patient, we will attract the trust of others and even the trust of the Spirit of God Himself. Our Lord is a wise manager. (“To him who has, even more will be given him, and he will have an abundance,” He says in Matthew 13:12)

Patience means accepting the pain of the delay of the fulfillment of our desires. It also means not quitting until our desires are fulfilled. 

~ kurt mähler

Perhaps no one is more patient than the successful farmer. Like the handles of the plow he holds, he has two forms of patience, one in his right hand, and one in his left, which together push the plow forward. In his right hand is the organized, planful patience of working one field today,  tomorrow another, and a third day pausing everything because the tractor needs repair.

But in his left hand is the patience he did not ask for, the patience required when there is too little rain, the market drops for his crops, or a tornado flattens the barn. Yet, if the farmer persists in patience with both hands, he is sure to progress as one plowing a straight furrow in the field. Nothing can stop him from preparing for the harvest.

We might not like self-control, yet it is the very thing we search for in others if we are going to trust them. 

~ kurt mähler

And by embracing patience, the farmer is sure of the one reward neither bane nor bruise can remove: the knowledge he has done all he can do. A good conscience, which is the foundation for real joy. And a “well done” with a lavish promotion when the owner of the farm returns. 

The Farmer and Right Timing

If half of farming is patience, the other half of farming is right timing. Yes, the farmer, like the rest of us, is on a lifelong learning curve of how to balance all his responsibilities and initiatives. But ‘balance’ is not what the farmer is pre-occupied with. He has the harvest in mind.

Therefore, it is more accurate to say that the farmer is not on a quest for work/life balance. He is on a quest for optimizing the season he is in. If it is spring, he is planting. If it is summer, he is nurturing the growth. If it is fall, it is harvest. If it is winter, it is the time to oil and restore his tools. Some seasons—such as the harvest—are all work from dawn to dusk, and there is no talk of moderation or balance. The harvest will perish unless it is gathered within a narrow window when the crop is perfectly ripe. If the weather changes before he gathers the  harvest, it is lost.

But there are other times—say, in the dead of winter when snowbanks seal one in—that it is the time of leisure for pulling out the fiddle, hot apple pie, and storytelling round the fire.

So we see here that the mindset is not one of industrially organizing and categorizing all matters; instead, it is the mindset of one who adapts to the season one is in. The essence of this wisdom fits into a proverb: There is much more joy in co-laboring with the timings of God than in being one’s own god. It is an act of faith that the season for each desire and each duty will come in due time. (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

The Farmer and the Power of Small

All things begin small, even the eternal Son of God, whose earthly life began as a microscopic seed in the womb of the Holy Virgin.

If it is true of the eternal Creator to begin His greatest work on earth through smallness, how much more must we recognize that we maintain all things through persistent, small actions.

The farmer knows this. Each season translates as a sequence of small practices. There may be  little variation or drama in the repetitive sequence, but there is a bumper crop at the end.

On the other hand, it is precisely in the context of daily faithfulness that discoveries are made, and they are all the more precious because they were unlooked for. Witness Moses at the Burning Bush, who met the Lord not because he sought the encounter, but while tending his father-in-law’s sheep. We see from this example that unpretentious, daily faithfulness is magnetic to the Holy Spirit. He draws near to such rarities.

“Sometimes when a farmer is looking for a suitable spot to which to transplant a tree, he unexpectedly comes across a treasure,” wrote Maximos the Confessor, who trusted in “the law of the farm”—that is, the power of consistent daily habits—even as rulers drove him into periodic exile.2 It is our turn to discover such treasure as we “farm” our lives and our days. 

The Parable of the Hidden Treasure by Sir John Everett Millais, ca. 1860. ​​Source: Aberdeen Archives, Galleries, and Museums

The Dark Side of Small

The farmer also knows the dark side of the power of small. Letting a few tiny pests abide in the crop ensures an army will multiply out of the few and destroy the whole thing. Letting a sagging fence go means the cow falls prey to wolves or eats the neighbor’s corn. 

In the same way, if we do not take initial small, dark thoughts captive, they will eat away at us until they take over and destroy much good we have labored long to develop both within ourselves and in our lives.

St. Isaiah the Solitary warns us: “I entreat you not to leave your heart unguarded, as long as you are in the body. Just as a farmer cannot feel confident about the crop growing in his fields, because he does not know what will happen to it before it is stored away in his granary, so a man should not leave his heart unguarded as long as he still has breath in his nostrils.”3  

If an ancient desert hermit far from the allure of Rome found this advice urgent, how much more urgent is it for us, who carry the entire world in our pocket through one slim phone. 

Peter of Damascus, an urban believer, exhorts us to remain farmers in our mindset: “Just as the earth—and especially good earth—becomes cloddish if the farmer does not work it, so our intellect becomes coarse and obtuse if we do not devote ourselves to prayer and reading, making this our chief task.”4

The Farmer and Joy

But for all the necessary admonitions to preserve our productivity, here is where the power of small perhaps has its most power: the joy of accomplishing a thing. For in the same way that the work on the farm never ends, the challenges and opportunities of our lives never end, and they are always beyond our ability to completely comprehend or accomplish. Therefore, it is precisely in the small things we do daily with a hope of the good fruit to come that we find daily joy.

And since joy is strength, that joy fortifies us for the major moments yet unseen over the  horizon: the storm, the harvest, and the hoedown of celebration when the owner of our farm returns and rewards us with a thornless Eden to cultivate alongside Him in the age to come.

That’s a harvest worth waiting for.

© Kurt Mähler


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Footnotes

  1. St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, a.k.a. Theodore of Edessa (AD 847-861). The Philokalia, Vol. 2. “A Century of Spiritual Texts.”  Translated by Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. FaithWalk Press, 2023. ↩︎
  2.  St. Maximos the Confessor (AD 580-662). The Philokalia, Vol. 2. Section (“Century”) 1. “Two Hundred Texts on Theology and Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God.” Translated by Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. FaithWalk Press, 2023. ↩︎
  3. St. Isaiah the Solitary (AD ca. 370-491 [aged approx. 120!]) The Philokalia, Vol 1. “On Guarding the Intellect,” Section 15. Translated by Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. Crux Press, 2022. ↩︎
  4. St. Peter of Damascus. The Philokalia, Vol. 3. “XII. Contemplation of the Sensible World” Translated by Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. FaithWalk Press, 2023. ↩︎

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Comments

  1. Kurt, this was everything I needed today. I love the way you write and minister, you are such a gift! Thank you. As a dual- military family with 2 small kids we are perpetually busy and oh how I desire to be purposefully busy and to create small intentional habits that will keep our family fixed on Jesus. This requires much dedication. Thank you for the reminder to focus on the small.

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