Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand

by Jeff Chu

Rage is misery that does not know where else to go. Sometimes I think rage gets mischaracterized as necessarily loud or shouty. If the rage-burdened person tends not to be loud or shouty, though, it can also manifest in other ways, as it did with me: as brittleness, or constant irritability, or extreme irascibility, or tetchy irrationality, or a total failure of self-control, or even all these things.

To name the soils that you come from is to acknowledge

that you were not self-made, because there is no such thing as a self-made human. It places you in the context of an ecosystem. It confesses that you are a creature—simply, someone created by forces beyond you—which is to say reared and scarred and sanded and formed. It admits that you are not some nebula floating in the ether but that you have roots and are inescapably interdependent with the world around you.

“Just be a friend,” he went on. “What we need to learn to do is to walk with each other. If we are willing to take the journey, knowing God will transform us on the journey, just be a friend and walk by their side. Just be a friend. That’s one of the things we are losing. Our children are losing it, too. Because we are prostituting ourselves for stuff.

longed to be respected, but I settled for being useful—and some days I fooled myself into thinking these were the same. In becoming the thing that is useful to other people, though, what do you lose? In conforming yourself to what the system wants and most values, what are you forced to give up?