Let Us Bow Our Heads

As I drove by wheat fields early last week, a thought kept drifting through my head: "Let us bow our heads for a word of prayer."

At the Stafford Garden Tour June 5, a friend and I were talking about harvest barreling toward us like a runaway freight train. (Can you tell neither of us had our harvest to-do lists checked off?)

The color had already shifted dramatically from green to mostly gold in the 100-degree-plus temperatures and brisk southern winds.

She said, "All that's left is for the heads to droop over."

I asked Randy if there was a technical term for the wheat heads bending over as harvest approached. If there is, he missed it in agronomy class at K-State.

But that image of bowed heads stayed with me through the week. I've heard the phrase uttered all my life before potluck dinners in the church basement. I've said it as I led prayers in Sunday School class.

I realize the wheat is just doing what wheat's DNA is programmed to do as it matures. As the head fills with grain, it starts bending over.

But it sure didn't hurt me to have that image of heads bowed in prayer. It's what I needed to remember during a week in which my to-do list was longer than the time I had to do it.

It's what I needed to remember as I thought about the people in my life who need prayers ... a little boy and his family in a Kansas City hospital going through another MRI and surgery on a tumor ... a young family on a Make a Wish trip with their preschool daughter ... a friend in the hospital recovering from a heart attack ... and another friend fighting for her very life in another Wichita hospital ... My prayer list went on and on and on.

It should be part of my DNA to respond with a bowed head and an open heart.

(More to come on the 2011 wheat harvest. We got started last Friday.)