The End of July

SCRIPTURE:  And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28 ESV

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Genesis 9:3 ESV

QUOTE: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.” – President Theodore Roosevelt

THOUGHT: The fireworks are done. The stands have closed. The little American flags are disappearing from sidewalks and driveways, packed away for next July. But, just like I can’t walk away from Sunday morning like it never happened, I can’t turn off July in my heart. I love this nation and the freedom it has given me.

Many of you may not know I have a little part time job where I deliver cars – and if I’m lucky, an occasional pickup truck – across the country. From sea to shining sea, I enjoy the land, its mountains and valleys, its rivers and oceans, its fields and pasturelands dotted with cows, sheep, horses and the occasional donkey. I think and pray while I drive, sometimes I write songs, and always I am thankful to live in such a place. I don’t take it for granted like I used to.

But I don’t believe a city has ever inspired a song in me. They’re fast, busy, often impersonal (as if they could be anything else), and sometimes I even go out of my way to go around the really big ones. I often think of Thomas Jefferson who said, “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”

Our World in Data reports that city-dwellers surpassed rural-dwellers in this country in 1920, and that by 2006 that was true of the entire world. They suggest that by 2050, 90% of our country will live in cities, as will almost 70% of the world (see charts here).

Farmland in American is being purchased by those who aren’t farmers – Bill Gates owned an estimated 275,000 acres as reported by The 2022 Land Report 100. In 2018, an unknown entity, Flannery Associates, LLC, began purchasing farmland around Travis Airforce Base in California, recently stepping up their purchases to a total of $800 million – effectively controlling three sides of one of the most important military installations in the U.S., yet local, state, and federal officials can’t, even now, figure out who’s behind the group. (full article as reported by ABC, July 23, 2023.)

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Chinese firms and investors (think government) own more land in the U.S. than Gates – 383,934 acres according to NPR. NPR doesn’t seem worried since that’s still far less than U.S. acreage owned by the countries of Canada (12.8 million acres), Netherlands (4.9M), Italy (2.7M), the U.K. (2.5M) and Germany (2.3M). (full article as reported by NPR, June 26, 2023.)

Maybe I shouldn’t worry; after all, I love God and trust his promises. He will never leave or forsake his children. But as I said, I love this country, and I can’t help but notice that each of the countries mentioned above (as well as Gates and the U.S.) are heavily invested in the World Economic Forum. The WEF’s stated goals, among others, are to achieve the UN’s agenda for net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 – and 30% of those emissions come from farming. Farmers around the world are struggling to keep up with the demands of their governments who are in step with Agenda 2030 to reduce nitrogen. Gates is proposing that we eat bugs, and don’t even get me started on the UN.

A consultant for Impossible Foods (who is also a professor of biology at UC Berkeley), Michael Eisen, made this incredible claim in a 2022 report written by he and Michael Brown, CEO of that company and a professor emeritus at Stanford (in other words, they have a monetary stake in the outcome), “Our work shows that ending animal agriculture has the unique potential to significantly reduce atmospheric levels of all three major greenhouse gases, which, because we have dithered in responding to the climate crisis, is now necessary to avert climate catastrophe.” (full article here from Berkeley News, February 2022) Eisen states the mission of Impossible Foods is to phase out animal agriculture in 15 years. You might laugh, but in November of 2022 the Dutch government began to systematically buy out farms and close them down in a bid to reduce nitrogen emissions 50% by 2030, one restriction being that the dispossessed farmer cannot buy land anywhere in the E.U. and farm again. Awkward in that half the land in the Netherlands is farmland. They are Europe’s biggest meat exporter and provide 38% of the worldwide market for dairy.

So perhaps it isn’t very spiritual to worry, but I do. Everywhere I look, power-mongers are messing with God’s ideas for human flourishing. So, at the end of July on the calendar, but not July in my heart, I say ‘God help us!’ Help us hold up your path to flourishing without shame. Let us not be content to be ignorant of the strategies of evil, nor of the strategies of good, and of the good God who loves this world.

PRAYER: Oh God, help us. Give us understanding; give us great wisdom and insight; give us prophetic words to speak the truth into a web of lies that wants to tie our country – and your world – in knots. Amen and amen!