Under All Is the Land

We have just come back from a ten-day trip to the Great Southwest where there are miles and miles of canyons, mountains, valleys, and generally rugged country.  While we were there, that area was also suffering from a heat wave that even natives were complaining about.  Temperatures of 115 degrees or more were common.

When this farm boy travels and looks over the countryside, he thinks about how the land is useful in some way.  Farming, ranching, irrigation, growing things; these are things that make the land valuable.  Human beings always seem to find ways to make the land work for them and be productive in some way.

But out in the Great American Desert, there isn’t really much that can be done.  Much of that land has never been touched by human feet, and may never be.  Water remains scarce, with just a few patches of valley or mesa here and there being irrigated and suitable for some kind of crop or livestock operation.  Deep canyons, steep mountain sides, dangerous weather conditions, remoteness and lack of availability of basic services…all of this and more make the notion of putting the land to productive use even more remote.

Yes, I know there are great scenes out there.  I know there are fantastic and incredible views.  I understand the magnificence of the mountains, canyons, and starry canopy.  There are truly great wonders of the world in the Great Southwest, and you should strive to see them at least once in your lifetime.  But the thought remains…what good is the land?  Are the thousands of square miles of this kind of country useless?  Is there no purpose in it?  Should we just write off this entire area as flyover country as we travel from Chicago to Los Angeles?

I don’t think so.  I came up with a statement during our trip out that I kind of like.  “We should appreciate the land for what it is; not for what it can do for us.”

It’s great to be able to work the land.  It’s a wonderful thing to coax the land to produce crops…fruits, vegetables, grains.  It’s good to use the land in some useful and productive way.  But it’s also good to understand that we aren’t masters over the land.  The land allows us to be stewards of it.  The land allows us to work it.  The land allows us to profit from it and have better lives because of it.  And it tells us that by holding back some of itself in the form of impenetrable wilderness and wild country.  Try as we might, we find it virtually impossible to tame all of the land.  So we go for only the small part of it that it allows us to have.

Our Lord created the land for many reasons.  Among them, I believe, is so we will appreciate that we are not the masters, but the caretakers.  We aren’t the dominating influence; we are part of the whole.  We don’t dictate the eventual outcome; we ride along with the creation as God moves it through time.

The Code of Ethics of the National Association of Realtors begins this way:  “Under all is the land. Upon its wise utilization and widely allocated ownership depend the survival and growth of free institutions and of our civilization.”

It seems to me that the wise utilization of much of the Southwest Desert should be to remind humanity of the greatness of the God who created it (and us), and that we are the caretakers …not the masters…of the land upon which we live.  If we get it…if we understand that…the land will have done the job for which it was created, and we will be enriched immeasurably.