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By J. Adam Tyler
Guest Columnist

In his 1990 essay, The Work of Local Culture, Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry tells the story of an old galvanized bucket that hangs on a fence post in a wooded corner of his grandfather’s farm. He walks by it often, and he never passes it without looking inside. What does he see there? “The greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth.” 

Berry writes that the bucket has hung there for many autumns; leaves have fallen into it, rain and snow have added moisture, and even squirrels have eaten the nuts that fell in and left the shells behind. Over the years, the forest detritus in the bucket has decayed and produced something: rich black soil, ready to the nutrients and cellular building blocks of everything that has fallen into it and turn it into something that will make life grow.

Berry is a masterful storyteller, but you don’t have to be to recognize the powerful metaphor that this old bucket provides. Like the bucket, we exist in a world where things from outside come in. Conversations with friends and acquaintances can fill our time and our hearts. News reports and opinion pieces can inform us and shape how we understand the world. Jokes, clean and not, can make us laugh or cringe. The things we look at over the course of the day – expense reports, kids’ homework, recipe books, our social media feeds – fill in the nooks and crannies of our attention. And a morning stroll around our yard, or an evening walk down the block, can fill our lungs with fresh air and open our minds to the beauty of nature.

We take in a lot each day, and like the bucket, over time what we take in builds up and creates whatever soil exists in our soul. Which matters a lot to what sort of life we grow: good or bad, calm or angry, inspiring or lackluster, life-giving or life-destroying.

Of course, this is not a new insight now, and it wasn’t a new insight when Wendell Berry wrote about the old bucket on his grandfather’s farm in 1990. Jesus himself told his disciples, “Good people bring good things out of the good stored up in their heart, and evil people bring evil things out of the evil stored up in their heart. For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45) What we produce – our words, our actions, our treatment of the world and the people around us – it emerges and grows from what is inside of us.

Is our soul good and rich soil for the growth of our life? Does it nourish our mind and create good deeds? Or is the soil of our soul deficient and toxic, producing nothing but brambles and thorns? It turns out, that depends a lot on what we let fall in our bucket.

REV. DR. J. ADAM TYLER is the senior pastor for Farmville Baptist Church, and he can be reached by email at pastor@farmvillebaptist.org.