The Summer the Ripe Fruit Rotted

In the 1930s, the Great Plains of America became a wasteland. For years, farmers had torn up millions of acres of native grassland, chasing wheat profits during the boom years. They ignored the soil. They ignored the warnings of conservationists like Hugh Hammond Bennett, who pleaded that the land could not endure such relentless extraction. The money was too good. The harvest too easy.

Then the rains stopped. The topsoil, no longer held by deep-rooted prairie grass, lifted into the sky. Black blizzards buried fences, suffocated cattle, and drove thousands of families from their homes. Children developed "dust pneumonia." In the hardest-hit counties of Oklahoma and Kansas, people who had once bragged about bumper crops now stood in breadlines, scanning empty horizons for relief that came too late.

The prophet Amos saw a basket of summer fruit and heard God say, "The end has come upon my people Israel." The nation had grown fat on dishonest commerce, trampling the needy, rigging the scales, selling the poor for a pair of sandals — all while impatiently waiting for the Sabbath to end so they could resume cheating. God promised a famine unlike any they had known: not of bread, but of hearing His word.

When a people exhaust the moral soil beneath their prosperity, the harvest eventually fails. And the deepest hunger is not for grain — it is for a word from the Lord that they can no longer hear.