process

Work, Faith, and Watermelons

Every Wednesday, every summer, I would help my dad sell watermelons at a local market in the early morning sun. We’d sling the big green fruit until the sun reached its apex and then head into the café for a burger and a Dr. Pepper. Each afternoon we’d park on an old bleacher at a cattle auction behind the café and watch dozens and dozens of livestock being sold.

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The auctioneer would rattle off numbers in a kind of turbo-speak auctioneer lingo. It sounds like absolute gibberish to anyone uninformed but is more like music to those who get it. I learned to love it. One afternoon I learned to love it even more.

In walked this pitiful looking skinny little black and white calf. He was clearly incredibly sick. His hind quarters looked like they were covered in his own poop. This little guy was knocking on death’s door.

The auctioneer looked down at the calf, tilted his wore-out old cowboy hat back on his head, and leaned over to the guy next to him to whisper behind his hand. When he sat back up and spoke into the microphone the speakers kind of squawked as he told the two hundred people gathered, “Startin’ the bidding at fifteen dollars.”

We all just kind of sat there for a second. Even in my eleven-year-old mind I could remember thinking, “Who would want a sick almost-dead calf? Even for $15.” Just as I thought they were going to send the sick little calf back to his pen (and an almost certain death) my dad did something I had never seen him do before at the auction. He raised his hand.

The auctioneer looked around. He looked some more. He did some more of the secret auctioneer jabbering and finished with five words which changed our lives, “Sold to the Watermelon King.” My dad had just bought our first cow.

Over the years we would buy a lot more cows. Hundreds of cows. Thousands of cows. We would sell some. We would eat some. We would lose some to death, disease, and predators; but not that first little black and white calf.

My dad loaded him up in the back of his tiny little pickup everyone called “Jimmy.” That morning the truck had been filled with vibrant green watermelons. That afternoon it carried a calf on death’s door. Both cargoes had a lot to teach me about living a life of love. We drove the little cow home, named him Oreo, and nursed him back to health.

Oreo started a chain reaction. We would sell our watermelons, go to the auction, and dad would buy a calf. They were almost always sickly and small. Without fail every one of them needed to be fed by a bottle. In a single summer our farm became a nursery for the downtrodden bovine masses. We were like a safehouse for diseased little orphan cows.

I didn’t know enough back then to realize what was happening. Today it makes perfect sense. My dad, The Watermelon King, as I heard the auctioneer say so many times, didn’t believe in hopeless cows or hopeless anything. Dad has always believed when you mix hard work with big faith you can land right in the middle of great hope. When hope seemed like a longshot to so many my dad saw the opportunity.

I guess I must have picked it up along the way. It’s hard for me to see a hopeless situation. I embrace the challenge. I find it almost impossible to shy away from the opportunity.

I love that about my dad. Just like I love it about Jesus. In heaven’s roll book there are no hopeless cases. There are simply empty lines waiting to have your name written in them. Everyone has a spot. Everyone has an invitation. Regardless of history or hang-up.

I cannot remember a childhood summer not completely occupied by watermelons. Some kids remember band camp. Some can fondly recall team camps and travel baseball. For the occupants of the King Farm it was all about those watermelons.

There have been many summers when the conditions for growing watermelons were extremely difficult. Even in the best of conditions the work can still be brutally hard. None of those factors have ever deterred the Watermelon King. During the extra hot or the extra dry years, he pumps water to his plants from nearby ponds. If there is an abundance of pests taking the crop he sorts out countermeasures. Over the decades he’s come up against plenty of hard times. Still the watermelons come off the vine by the thousands. This year will be no different.

I don’t really know how I could even begin to quantify the amount of time I spent working those fields before life sent me elsewhere. My dad has done it his entire life.

It was sometimes backbreaking work. There was the planting season when we’d crawl on our hands and knees transplanting tiny plants. Later we would walk the same long rows of young plants again with a garden hoe in hand as we went around killing weeds. We would plow, and fertilize, and irrigate, and protect. All the things you do to protect such an undertaking.

Inevitably right around Independence Day each year dad would begin to pick some to check them. Once they were ripe the next few weeks would be a blur of picking, stacking, carrying, sweating, and selling. It was enough to make a young man start wishing for school to start.

Dad knew what his dad knew before. The Watermelon King learned it from Preacher King. Work makes winners. There is progress in the process. A watermelon doesn’t spring up overnight. A man doesn’t either.

It can be a hard way to live. It can also be a holy way to live. There is a simple joy found in it. A unique perspective. Years of toting all the ripe green fruit shaped me in so many ways. It strengthened my arms as well as my heart. It set the stage for what God has been teaching me now for more than twenty-five years—living things grow. There is beauty in the progress. Jesus knows no hopeless cases or empty fields. No conditions are too hard or intimidating. He works in us and on us and calls it good.

It starts with a seed in the soil. It sprouts, blossoms, and yields life. You can’t have a field without the work, and the field is fruitless without the process.

The faith life for those following Jesus is not so different. It starts with a small seed in good soil. Your soul sprouts, blossoms, and gives fruit. It gives life. You can’t have the faith without the work, and the faith is fruitless without the process.