Drive through Central Texas in July and you will see something that puzzles a lot of people who don’t live around here. The fields are full of corn that looks dead. The stalks are brown and dried out. The ears are drooping. Everything about it looks like something went wrong.
I have heard people ask about it. “Why did they let it go like that? Did the crop fail? Why didn’t they harvest it sooner?” The questions are understandable, because to the untrained eye, it honestly looks like the farmer made a mistake.
But that is not what happened at all.
Most of the corn raised in this part of Texas is not sweet corn. It is field corn and it was never meant to end up on your dinner table. Most of it is destined for feed lots, silos, and livestock operations. And here is the thing about field corn: the farmer wants it dry. As it dries, he may harvest it with some moisture left for silage, or he may let it dry completely for grain. So the farmer does something that looks counterintuitive to people watching from the road. He lets it stand. He lets it dry. He waits until exactly the right moment, and then he harvests it.
The observer sees failure. The farmer sees the plan working perfectly. We do not know what he knows about that particular crop. We do not know what the market looks like, what the soil did this year, what equipment he has, or what long-term plan he is working toward. We are driving by, glancing at a field we do not own, making a judgment about a process we do not understand. The problem is, we are not standing where the farmer is standing.
There is a lot of life in that picture.
How many times have you watched someone make a decision and thought, “That makes no sense”? A friend takes a job that seems like a step backward. A leader chooses a slower path when a faster one seems obvious. A family makes a choice that looks, from the outside, like they simply stopped trying. And we form our opinions, sometimes share them with others, based on everything we can see from the road.
Most of us assume that what we can observe is the whole story. We forget that every decision is made from a vantage point we may not have access to. And when we rush to interpret what we see without asking questions or extending grace, we are essentially telling ourselves that our limited view from the road is more reliable than the farmer’s experience and first-hand knowledge. The most important question before you form an opinion about someone else’s decision is a simple one: What do I not know here?
Now take that thought and press it into something much bigger.
There are seasons in life when it looks like God has let something go wrong. The prayer you have been praying has not been answered the way you hoped. The door you were sure was supposed to open is still closed. The person you love is going through something hard, and you cannot see what good could possibly come from it. From where you are standing, the field looks dead. But you are not standing where the Farmer is standing.
Isaiah 55:8-9 says it plainly: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
God is not unaware. He is not behind schedule. He is not wringing His hands wondering what went wrong. He knows what that crop is for. He knows when the harvest is. He knows how many people and purposes will be served by the process you are in the middle of right now. He is not looking at dead corn and seeing failure. He is watching something dry out exactly the way it needs to, on exactly the timeline He planned.
Faith is not pretending everything looks fine. The corn really does look dead. Your situation really is hard. Honest faith does not require you to ignore what you see. It just refuses to let what you see have the final word.
The farmer trusts the process because he understands it. We trust the process because we know the One who designed it. The next time you drive by a field of dried corn let it remind you of something: the story is not finished, the harvest is coming, and the Farmer has not walked away.
He is just waiting for exactly the right time.
I am John W. Crowder, pastor of First Baptist Church in West, Texas. View from the Vine is a place where I write about faith, leadership, and life rooted in John 15:5. If this post encouraged you, I would love for you to share it.
John W. Crowder 
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