It’s that time of year again.
This is the time we just absolutely could not wait for back when blizzards raged across the frozen prairie, when you wouldn’t dare venture outside without seven layers and forty pounds of insulation covering your body, when the measure of a man was the stoutness and hardiness of his ice scraper.
Yes, it’s summer —midsummer to be exact. It’s that glorious time when the heat index and the relative humidity can simultaneously approach triple digits. When the lightning bugs flash in the night and wall clouds build on the western horizon thick with the promise of God’s thundering voice and a fireworks show complete with life-giving rain for the lush green biomass covering Kinship Radioland. This is the photosynthesis machine in high gear cranking out all sorts and kinds of delicious, glorious bounty for our tables.
And among that bounty there are three things that immediately come to mind that one cannot buy in the megabox corporate megastore: homegrown sweet corn, homegrown tomatoes, and homegrown cucumbers.
Yes, the giganto-mart does sell corn, tomatoes, and cucumbers, but they just are not the same as what comes out of my garden or what that farmer by the side of the road is selling. This is the real thing, folks. That other stuff is edible, but it’s kind of like the difference between TV love and honest-to-goodness real love. One is like nothing else in the world. The other is a shadow, a vain attempt at the real thing that leaves one fed but unfulfilled.
It’s because the real thing is always homegrown.
Kinship Radio is like that. What you hear on your radio every day is not something some megacorporation produced and packaged in Midtown Manhattan for a mass market coming to you from some dog star in outer space. Kinship Radio comes to you from people just like you. It comes from your friends and neighbors. It has its roots in local people who had a vision for a local radio station broadcasting things for local people. It was born and nurtured by your prayers and your support and those two things are still what keeps it growing and thriving by the grace of a loving and wonderful God.
Yes, most (but not all) of the music comes from outside the area, but the particular songs are prayerfully chosen with you in mind by people you know and who know you.
Now, I am a huge fan of how the Holy Spirit moves people’s souls through the power of music, and some Christian stations are quite successful playing almost all music all the time, but teaching and preaching from the Word is glorious and wonderful, too.
If Kinship Radio didn’t broadcast those kinds of things, I would have never heard Alistair Begg say, “And I am not insensate, dear ones, to the irony of a Scottish preacher named Begg preaching on tithing.” (Which is quite probably the funniest line I’ve ever heard in any sermon anywhere.)
Nor would I have heard, many years ago, a kindly old preacher named Hayford change my life by saying, “Praise of the LORD creates an atmosphere the enemy cannot move through.” That one sentence led me to ask the LORD every day to help me to live a life of gratitude and praise. And let me tell you, dear ones, the enemy of our souls does indeed flee from praise of the LORD. It’s a wonderful way to live and that one concept, that one tiny nugget of spiritual inspiration, is one reason you are reading this blog right now. The cascade effect of drawing near to God has drawn me to distant lands and glorious times and through it I have had the honor and privilege to get the slightest of inklings of the awesome, indescribable, infinite majesty and grandeur of the love of God.
So, as you sit down some midsummer evening in the near future with the mourning doves cooing and the cicadas humming and your homegrown supper of a BLT and sweet corn with a side of cucumbers in that white sauce grandma used to make on the table in front of you, thank our Father in heaven for that which is homegrown.
Today’s Praise
Pslam 4:7
Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased. (KJV)