Why We Need Open-Pollinated Corn

I was driving down the road the other day and looking at the hybrid corn fields whizzing past. They were all in nice neat rows, with plants all the same height, with ears of corn all growing out of the stalk at exactly the same internode, with one stalk per seed planted, with one ear of corn per plant. Practically perfect uniformity! I paused to reflect on what my open-pollinated corn field looks like: nice, neat rows but vastly varying heights, ears of corn coming out at all different points on the stalk, some stalks with two to three ears of corn, some with up to five stalks coming from a single seed. A veritable mish-mash of diversity!

And then it hit me. God's creation is all this different stuff wedded in an amazing (read a-maize-ing!) symphony of life. All this different stuff in a complete unity. The world - our culture - tries to bring unity out of diversity but ends up with a counterfeit reality called uniformity. The only way the world can try to attain unity is by mandating sameness, mandating conformity. That's because the world isn't Trinitarian. But God is. God is three different persons in one unity. All not the same, all different, but all in one, and God’s creation reflects this. God’s creation is divine simplicity run amok. Billions of different people, animals, plants, microbes, compounds all united in one unity. And God attains this unity by requesting surrender. Surrender to God that is love - because love binds all things together. We don't need uniformity through conformity - we need unity through surrender. We need open-pollinated corn.

Neal Reishus