Fields of flowers

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It took a lot of work for us to become ordained ministers. The standard preparation for ordination in our denomination was a four-year undergraduate degree and a three-year masters program, internships, clinical education, and examination by an ecclesiastical council. Our academic work was rigorous. In those days we were required to be full-time residents at the seminary during our education. Times were different than they now are, and the process of education was different as well. The seminary from which we graduated no longer has a residential campus. Students complete their studies with a combination of online classes and short seminars held in the seminary’s single building. The majority of students begin their seminary careers as part-time students, speeding their education out over time as required by their busy lives.

I enjoyed the intensity of full-time residential education. I continued in seminary for an additional year and earned my Doctor of Ministry degree as a full-time student. We supported ourselves through a combination of scholarships, part-time jobs, grants, loans, internships and work-study programs. We lived very modestly in tiny apartments with a simple lifestyle.

After graduation, there was a period of adjustment for young ministers as they went out into the “real” world, away from their academic careers and learned to serve in communities. Some of our classmates struggled during those early years. Many of them changed jobs after three or four years in their first parish. The common wisdom at the time was that it took five years of practical experience in the parish for a pastor to become fully formed. Those early years we seen as a continuation of the education process and the formation of a minister.

I went to the parish with the intention of serving for a few years to gain that experience and then returning to specialized health-care ministry, where I had interned as a student. As it turned out, I loved the work of the parish. From the beginning, I felt that I fit in and that I had found my life’s work. I never left the parish and I haven’t regretted it.

One of the things that worked for me in my education was that I grew up in a rural community. My father was only a “hobby” farmer and we never had a ranch, but his business was serving ranchers and I understood ranch economy. I worked on my cousin’s and uncle’s farms during my high school summers and understood how farms and ranches worked. Our first parish was in the ranch country of southwest North Dakota and I immediately felt at home among the people we served there.

Our second call was to an urban congregation. There were almost no families in the congregation who earned their living through ranching. The dynamics of the congregation were very different. It was a good decade serving that church and I am glad I had that experience, but there was definitely a steep learning curve for me on institutional dynamics and leadership when I made the transition from the rural farm and ranch-based congregation.

Both of those experiences served me well in our South Dakota congregation, which was a mixture of folk. There were a few farm and ranch families and plenty of people who had retired from farm and ranch work as well as those whose jobs were less connected to food production. Rapid City serves a very large area, with lots of ranchers who come to the city for services such as health care, shopping, and the like.

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Our retirement move to the Northwest has brought us into a whole new kind of place. Our town is surrounded by farms but they are unlike the large wheat farms and cattle operations I knew from my growing up and early parish years. Skagit County is home to a lot of small farms, producing a wide variety of crops. I am fascinated by orchards and Christmas tree farms and especially intrigued by the fields of flowers.

Daffodils and Tulips are grown on a commercial scale here. The month of April is tulip festival and most of the businesses in town are geared up for the visitors from out of town who come to view the tulip fields.

We have visited the Netherlands, but we did not visit during the time of the tulip bloom. We’ve seen pictures, but it is something entirely different to walk among acres and acres of flowers. I certainly don’t understand the economy of flower farming, but it is clear that there are multiple revenue streams. The farms sell flowers to the cut-flower market. I think that the flowers that are shipped around the world to florist shops are primarily harvested by hand. Workers select flowers that will open fully when placed in water. They are cooled for shipment and handled with care.

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Another important revenue stream is the selling of bulbs. The flower farms offer online and catalogue sales of bulbs. The flower bulb market boomed last fall. The pandemic meant that people were spending more time at home and invested in lawn and garden care. Because we were interested, we visited the flower farm stores and purchased a few bulbs for planting, but the big business of those farms is online and catalogue sales.

A third revenue stream is hosting visitors when the fields are in bloom. This was cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic, but this spring limited visits are available by reservation. We took several drives through the countryside to determine the timing of the bloom and chose a day when we could take our grandchildren to visit a tulip farm yesterday. The farm had about five acres of parking that was nearly full. There was an on-farm flower store, a place where you could place orders for bulbs, a cafe, an art show, and more. And there were acres and acres of flowers.

It was amazing, even though we had scouted ahead and had a sense of the scale of the farms. Our grandchildren were delighted and we got some good pictures of them in the fields of tulips.

Even though it has been decades since we were full time students, we continue to learn about people and the process of ministry.

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