The Farmer Who Planted in Ash

In 1983, a wheat farmer named Harold Volkmer stood at the edge of his scorched fields outside Ash Flat, Arkansas, after a wildfire had swept through three counties. His neighbors loaded trucks and left for the city. His wife wept at the kitchen table. The soil was black and smelled of ruin.

Harold did something no one understood. He knelt in the charred dirt, scooped it into his hands, and began to plant winter wheat — row after slow row, pressing seeds into ground that looked utterly dead. His brother-in-law called him a fool. The county extension agent shook his head.

But Harold knew something about ash. He knew fire unlocks nitrogen. He knew scorched earth, given time, becomes some of the richest soil on the planet. He did not rush. He did not rage. He planted, and then he waited — quietly, deliberately, through a long and silent winter.

By April, his fields were the greenest in the county.

The writer of Lamentations stood in the ash of Jerusalem — the temple destroyed, the people scattered, everything smoldering. And from that scorched place he wrote, "The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." This is not passive resignation. This is Harold Volkmer faith — the kind that kneels in blackened soil and presses seeds into ruin, trusting that the God who made the earth has not forgotten how to make things grow.