Parents have been talking kids out of their passion for a long time?

My Dad’s Passion for Farming

Heavy cry, today.

It's not that I'm missing my dad, who died on Palm Sunday, right after Covid started, last year, at 92. Nah, it's not that. It's something else.

Back in '16, Dad sent a letter exchange between him and his father, from back in 1954. He had told me about them, prior to that, and I asked if I might see them. He obliged and sent them. I never really looked at them, 'til now.

At that point, Dad was 26. He had gone to Lutheran Bible Institute in Mpls, also junior college in Wahoo, NE, and graduated from Gustavus College in MN, a Swedish-Lutheran small school out in farm country, that spring.

A Crisis of Calling

Now, he's into the second semester of his first year, writing home to the family farm in Kittson County, the northwesternmost county in MN, on the Canadian and North Dakota borders. And, what kills me about Dad's letter home is something I always believed about my own father, even though he never spoke these words of this letter to me. As you can see in the typed paragraph I excerpted, he's having not a crisis of faith, but of calling. Here he is in seminary in Rock Island, IL, longing for the farm, feeling called to work the soil. He specifically states that the spring-like day makes him want to “come up and go to work up there for a few days or longer to prepare for spring's work etc,” almost quietly asking for permission to come home for a while and work the farm and machine shop they had for producing the 'crop duster,' which was Grandpa's invention for spraying crops with pesticide.

He continues, “Sometimes, I wonder if that isn't my place – at least, so it's so very close to my heart that I can't quite shut it out of my mind.” He's going into ministry, yet dreaming of crops, soil, machinery, and animals. Speaking now of his brothers, who would themselves go to seminary and ministry, at different points, “With Alden well on his way to getting into the scholarly life for which I think he was cut out, and Paul maybe likewise, I think of the opportunity in my hand to swing back into full-time farming which I once was sold on doing. Maybe it would be the most honorable thing for me to do – and Christian thing, too – to think of that as being what I was cut out for.”

Later in the day, he comes back to the letter and writes, “I have always liked farming, etc. and I sometimes feel very strongly that I should spend my life in Kittson County on the farm taking care of what has been given us thus far by God and good parents. Also, I think that in that way also, it would more possible assure Erland [youngest brother, still a kid] of a chance to go on for more schooling and maybe become a greater student and/or minister than I.”

Begging for Parental Permission to Return to Farming

He's fucking selling!!!! He's so begging his father to give him permission to leave the ministry and go back to the work he loves – farming.

As a guy who spends his life setting adults and youngsters free to live their own lives and who sees the pain, daily, when people are still gripped by the wants and demands of parents, my soul grieves for my own father. I have told a million people a million times that my father was a farmer, at heart. A good pastor, to be sure. But never passionate about anything more than farming. In his 80s, he would drive to Mahnomen, MN, to drive a heavy truck in the fields during sugar beet harvest, just for fun.

God!!!!! What the f—k!?! He spent his whole life pining for the farm and to go back to where he felt most at home. [Crying, writing this.]

Grandpa's response and Grandpa's tone from the rest of the letter is not one of a man of anger or force, but a loving, firm, and doting father. He's the type of father the sons don't fear angering but fear disappointing – a sometimes infinitely more powerful elixir in steering young ones from themselves.

And may I preface this by saying that the Erlandson farm was a massively successful family farm for the era? 1600 acres during the Depression and WWII and after. Plus, the revenue-producing machine shop. This was no small operation and it was a labor of love, at least for my father.

Talking His Son Out of His Passion for Farming

Though, Grandpa Alric references Martin Luther's concept of the “priesthood of all believers” – ie that even the layman is just as much a priest as the cleric, just as honorable a vocation, just as close to God – he then goes on to write this in his obviously loving letter, “Maybe it would do you some good to hear a bit of testimony from your old dad, as the years pass by [Grandpa in his 50s, at this point], I feel more and more my inability to serve my loving Savior and I feel it would be a real desired privilege to have the education and ability to preach and teach – as you now have. Farming must be looked at only as a means of making a living. We, your mother and I, hear often from people we talk to how much they appreciate your sermons [when you preached here on last visit] and how you are so fitted for the ministry...”

He's pushing back, gently. He's counter-selling, Dad. Grandpa has his own wishes, it seems, that he's trying to encourage Dad to pursue them. The letter ends with this snippet from Grandpa, “So, LeRoy, my fatherly advice would be why not forget the farm and what love for the earthy and set your mind on full service to Him who has provided so wonderfully for your education and preparation to serve him full time. He will give the reward...”

Because Grandpa Wanted to Be a Pastor and Not a Farmer

Did you see what happened in that last paragraph? I'm sure it wasn't Grandpa's intention to turn the phrase that way, as he was a self-described simple man. And, it would be quite consistent with the Lutheran-Christian language of that era and my family to say that God “provided so wonderfully for your education and preparation to serve” and to mean it as such. But, in a way, my Dad's dad was the one who provided so wonderfully. And would it be all that unreasonable if the subconscious of the 26-year-old interpreted it as “Dad provided for me and now I should serve the interests that Dad determines full time”?

F—kin hell!!! Dad got talked out of pursuing his passion by a father who wished that he, himself [Grandpa], could be a pastor.

Pursuing What You Wand and Not What Your Parent Wants

So, I raise this only to tell you of my tears, today. But also, to ask you this question, do you think this notion of children having their own ideas of what would make them happy, and parents having their own ideas of what their grown child should do (to make the parent happy, perchance), is a new phenomenon? Yes, Dad could find the good in anything and found the good in ministry. But there is zero doubt that finding the good in something and pursuing what you love are two completely different things.

Ah, the power of the fear of disappointing a parent....