In June 1944, US Navy pilot Dale Dieterich flew his Grumman Hellcat F6F fighter over plowed fields in France. As he headed back to his aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, those fields whispered to his own Kansas farm roots.
Scanning one field, he “noticed there were trees planted in the center of it. His Kansas background told him there was something wrong with the picture because the plow lines went right through the trees and not, as in Kansas, around them. When he dipped down and gave the trees a long burst, the whole thing caught fire. The trees were camouflaged over a parked gasoline convoy.”[1]
How many other pilots flew over that farm and saw nothing unusual?
What We See
The actual physiology of sight – light passing through the cornea, pupil, and lens and then striking the retina – is only a part of how we see. We cannot interpret the light and patterns of our environment without the symphony of all our faculties. Everything we see passes through the filters of our life experiences, mental and physical health, beliefs, fears, yearnings, education, etc.
That is why different people can look at anything – a computer chip, an explosion, a car wreck, a baby sonogram – and hold vastly different interpretations of what they see. Do you think the pilot’s knowledge of farming caused him to see that field in a way a Brooklyn-born pilot would not?
How could a convoy of trucks be hidden in a field? How can an apple tree, even a whole orchard, hide in a seed? Or how can diaphanous clouds haul tons of rainwater?
A driving question: If I know things of great significance and mystery hide in plain sight, how can I so quickly reject them without deeper and longer thought? How can we embrace or reject ideas or people or things without sufficient observation?
What the Biologist Saw
On September 3, 1928, when Alexander Fleming, a biologist, returned to his London lab after an August vacation, he discovered a petri dish of staphylococci had been left out in the open air. As he gazed at the disk, Fleming saw something that would change the course of history: the staph infection had not grown. A blue-green mold had killed the staph.
That simple seeing launched one of the most significant medical breakthroughs in history. Fleming had discovered penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic. He was knighted in 1944 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945. In 2000, it was estimated that penicillin had saved over 200 million lives.
All because of what a man saw in a yucky blue-green mold.
What do I see every day that (because of a high yuck-factor) repulses me away from its significance? What great discoveries do I miss because I choose to ignore or reject something unpleasant?
So, what do apples, penicillin, and rain have in common? They all carry new promises ... even as they remain locked on, in, or above the earth. They hide until the time comes for their manifestation.
Rain
The assurances flow across the millennia—prophetic words about all things becoming new, crooked paths made straight, wrongs made right, and the restoration of all things. Yet voices from Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and other conflicts seem to dispute the promise. So, how do we live between the promise and the appearance?
Look up.
Rain mysteriously forms up there, then comes down here. It nourishes, cleanses, and pulls foliage out of hiding. From the time I was 13, I worked for my granddad and other Kansas farmers; I saw how they lived and worked in accord with that Big Sky.
The farmers of my youth didn’t download information from cultural voices. They didn’t find quick wisdom on YouTube or Facebook. They spent thousands of hours in the seat of a tractor, on the back of a horse, building or fixing fences, studying crop and livestock prices. All beneath that sky.
Most of us are not farmers. But the formula probably remains the same. Ignore fast answers, distrust your emotional reactions, be patient, humble yourself, ignore distractions, watch, work hard, think, listen to God and His creation.
Look up.
[1] Michael Stern, “D-Day, Southern France,” Mechanix Illustrated, December 1944, p 155
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