Arm Wrestling the World for God

These farmers and those like them carry an unsentimental clarity of what is essential and what is not. They know the weight they carry and what is expected of them—like Christ at the base of Golgotha—so they just move forward for fifteen and sixteen hours, six days a week. The fix to the fallen world and the Church’s unraveling is here in flyover country, but because the solution is forged by quiet men in pickups, no one pays it much mind. The fix to everything, it seems, can be seen out here on the prairie; but when Manhattanites and D.C. frequent flyers pass overhead for business or a quick-hitter in Vegas, few consider the slow-moving dots moving across the fields below. It is the tractor in the grain field, the 8-year-old girl walking to the coop to collect the eggs, a cowboy herding livestock, men helping a farming neighbor mend a collapsed fence