Ironically, the last two nights have been beautiful full moons, a true harvest moon. I say ironically because yesterday I got to harvest rice for the first time in my life: picking, scything, winnowing, the whole works. Its amazing how just doing some of this manual agricultural labor puts color on a lot of the Biblical stories. While we were in the field we got to talking about the story of Ruth and Naomi. I found that as I was telling the story and pulling rice of the stalk with my bare hand, the story didn’t seem so ancient anymore. It seemed like I could have been telling a story about something that had just happened in a nearby village.

As I’m out there, I am also impressed with how much of the Bible is written from an agricultural perspective. Sometimes I wonder if these people are more readily suited to understand some of these stories and teachings of Jesus than I’ll ever be. When we got to the part of Ruth’s story where Boaz was out sleeping in his field, it seemed the only logical thing for him to be doing at that time since just a few days before the guy in the next field over had just had a lot of his rice trapped down and eaten by a wild pig.

I don’t think I’m suggesting that Westerners take up subsistence farming again just to understand the Bible, but I praise God that He wrote His book for common everyday people. There are, to be sure, difficult parts, but much of the Bible is right down on everybody’s level. Its even more obvious to me that God wrote the perfect book.