Songs of Wheat, Refrains of Birds

Self-sufficiency comes all too easily. The ravens know a better way.

A small patch of wheat is growing in my backyard, rustling in the morning breeze, greeting the sun each new day. 

The house is located on a busy street of a small Midwestern town; no farmland, this. But the wheat doesn’t care.

A year ago we moved into this house in mid-summer, transplants from Georgia, where we had lived for more than a decade. We left behind a sea of primordial-looking green: Wild ivy and oak and blackberry bushes conspired to form a jungle, increasingly more impassable each year, behind the house. Welcoming us into our new home as we first walked up to the front door were flowers in bloom, purples, blues, pinks, but especially yellows. We did not plant these flowers, I kept thinking to myself, overcome with the generosity of this gift of simple yet lavish beauty. We did not build this house, which we loved at first sight, and we most certainly did not plant this wheat. 

Such gifts are difficult to receive graciously, to accept with the gratitude of a heart content to dwell in the body it has been given. We, fallen creatures of flesh and blood, either presumptuously demand what we think is ours but never truly is, or we refuse altogether to accept a gift freely given. Discontent, we dream of other, better gifts—other homes, other lands, and perhaps other flowers too. Or at least fewer weeds. 

It has always been thus. At the end of his life, Joshua, who had faithfully led Israel into the promised land, offers one final message from God to the people: “I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.” That was the land the people had rejected a generation earlier, when Joshua was a young man. To reject a gift, and then to accept it only with grumbling or entitlement: Such is our habit too. It is hard to value something for which one did not toil in sweat. 

And yet, it is only the Tower of Babel that people built entirely on their own. The magnificent product of human engineering—and presumably plenty of sweat (hello, Middle Eastern summers!)—it was filled with empty glory, doomed to judgment and destruction. It was a paradox in brick, a monument to human strength and frailty at once. How could it be anything else, a work born of hearts that reject beautiful gifts but want to create something entirely their own?

We are conditioned from birth to stubborn, self-sufficient independence. Teach the baby to self-soothe, the books advise. Teach the child how to do all things for herself, pediatricians and teachers remind. Train this child to go off alone, to know how to live alone, how to exist without others. Love yourself, be your own best friend. Such is the mantra of the twenty-first century #girlboss. If you can’t rely on yourself, who can you even rely on, the truism asks. Our version of the Tower of Babel today is one constructed singly, free from reliance not only on God but on other people. 

The birds know better.

In a world that glorifies independence and self-reliance—a world that mourns Babel as something that could have been—God has always called people to forsake the man-made grain towers and fortification walls and rely on his provision instead. How extraordinary. 

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to ask for the day’s bread; just this day’s gift. But what about tomorrow’s gift, we can’t help but ask. For that matter, what about next year’s? It would be so comforting to know. Yet if I knew, if I had only that for which I toiled myself, with my own proud two hands, would I know greater peace? Probably not. Besides, I have no skills for either building houses or growing plants. 

Still, the gifts keep coming. After disappearing for the fall and winter, the yellow flowers are back, thanks to no effort of mine. 

And then there is that new patch of wheat out back. 

Eighteenth-century hymn-writer William Cowper reflects,

Beneath the spreading heavens
no creature but is fed;
and He who feeds the ravens
will give His children bread.

I am one of those children, right along with the ravens. God gave me bread today; he will give more tomorrow—and the day after, and the day after that. He could even use the ravens to provide—as he once did for Elijah the prophet.  

For that matter, it was the ravens who planted the wheat in my backyard.  

Filled with compassion for the birds in the snowy days of winter, my tender-hearted husband hung a birdfeeder behind the house on a hook that stood waiting for this very purpose. (We did not build this house; we did not set up this tall stand and hook for a birdfeeder behind it.) Filled with Walmart’s generic all-birds seed blend, the feeder attracted joyful customers right away. Profligate in their joy, they scattered some of the seeds around, and now the seeds have sprouted. 

For that is the other bit of context to know: The wheat growing in my backyard is located beneath and around the birdfeeder. Context matters here; the mystery is solved.

But is it, truly? The mystery of God’s provision is unsolvable, unexplainable, invisible much of the time—that is, until bleary-eyed you walk outside one ordinary morning, only to be greeted by the tall, lush wheat you did not even notice until that day. 

This past year has been a season of gifts—unasked, unbidden, yet they keep coming. I am still not very good at accepting them, even as the feeling of gratitude is overpowering at times. True gratitude requires that we stand still, but how do I stand still after a lifetime of running?

For one thing, I have no idea what to do with this wheat now. But maybe the birds do.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023), Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (forthcoming, IVP Academic, 2024), and Christians Reading Pagans (forthcoming, Zondervan Academic, 2025). She is Managing Editor for Current, where she also edits The Arena blog, and Contributing Editor for Providence Magazine and Front Porch Republic.

_{Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Wheat Fields with Crows, Wikimedia Commons}