Black Sunday and the Unmaking of the Plains

On April 14, 1935, the residents of Boise City, Oklahoma, watched the horizon disappear. A wall of black dust three thousand feet high rolled across the plains at sixty miles per hour, turning midday into midnight. Birds fled before the advancing darkness. Cattle suffocated in the fields. Families huddled under wet sheets, gasping for air in their own kitchens.

The Dust Bowl did not arrive without warning. For years, farmers had stripped the southern plains of their native grasses, plowing millions of acres of fragile topsoil to chase wheat profits. Agricultural experts like Hugh Bennett had pleaded for conservation, but the warnings went unheeded. The land was too profitable to protect. So when the drought came, there was nothing left to hold the earth in place. The very soil rose up and buried what people had built.

Jeremiah saw something terrifyingly similar in his prophetic vision — "I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty; and at the heavens, and their light was gone." God showed him creation running backward, the mountains quaking, the birds fleeing, the fruitful land becoming desert. Not because of natural disaster, but because His people were "skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good."

The Dust Bowl reminds us that when we strip away what God has rooted — whether topsoil or righteousness — the scorching wind eventually comes, and it leaves nothing standing.