The sun rose over the Bad Axe field in a hush, as though God Himself had leaned down and laid a quiet hand upon the trembling Earth. The fields, long and unbroken, shimmered with dew like the tears of saints kneeling before an altar.
Abel Santiago stood there at the edge of his father’s old bean field, hands hanging heavy at his sides, his boots swallowed in the wet hush of morning grass. He felt the years pressing against his back, each season a stone added to a great invisible cairn he had carried since boyhood. The farm had been in his family since before he had words to describe love, or loss, or the gentle cracking of a heart beneath too many harvest moons.
Things fall apart, his mother used to say, her voice as soft as muslin fluttering on the clothesline. She would whisper it while picking the last apricots, while scrubbing the stubborn dust from the windowsills, while kneeling at night in her prayer shawl before the cross she had nailed to the wall.
Abel never understood then. He thought things could be mended with bailing wire—with a strong back and a stubborn will. But the storms that came were not always from the sky; they rose inside a man, coiling like dark smoke beneath the ribs. His father’s silence had been a thunder that split the home’s rafters; his brother’s departure had been a slow hemorrhage that left Abel’s arms empty even when full of earth.
That morning, standing by the cypress tree that had bent beneath the coastal winds but never broken, Abel saw the house tilting with rot, the barn missing boards like a mouth missing teeth, and the rust bleeding down the old tractor’s side. The farm was no longer a promise but a sad parable—one told in sighs and long silences.
Yet in that deep loneliness, there pulsed a low, warm thrum. Abel’s mother’s Bible lay open on the kitchen table, pages ruffled and yellowed. “Behold, I make all things new,” it read, the ink smudged by her tears long ago.
Abel pressed his fingers into that verse as if to draw up a root, to find some hidden water beneath the droughted soil of his spirit. The words clung to him like morning mist—a gentle, stubborn ghost that would not leave.
Later that day, when the sun was fat and low, Abel took a hammer and began mending the fence. He moved slow, almost reverent, each nail a small act of repentance, each board a fragile hymn. He did not know if he would save the farm, or if it would slip away like a bird startled from the orchard. But he knew Christ’s hands had once held wood and nails too, not for a fence but for the salvation of all splintered things.
Abel felt, in the aching hush of evening, that though things fall apart, they do so into the arms of a Savior who gathers every fragment.
And when the stars blinked open above the valley, Abel stood beneath them, his face upturned, the scent of cedar and earth rising around him like incense. The cypress still bent, but it had not broken. Abel’s heart, too, bent beneath the weight of loss and love, but it beat on—steadfast as a psalm sung into a dark, uncertain night.
And in that simple, trembling persistence, he discovered that things do fall apart, but they fall toward a mercy deeper than the deepest furrow—a mercy that waits with open, nail-scarred hands.
The Lutheran Column 