The island of Manhattan must have seemed huge to the Dutch who first arrived in 1626, securing the rights to farmland by paying the Lenape people $24 in beads and trinkets for the area that would come to be known as “Manhatto.” Forty years later the British took over and the island would grow so populated the only place left to go was up. Fortunately, the Otis Elevator company was there, ready to begin shuttling New Yorkers into the sky day and night, higher and higher every year. Suddenly the air above the island could support not merely a five-storey walkup, but ten storeys, then twenty-five storeys, then fifty storeys and beyond.
E.B. White referred to Manhattan’s tall buildings as “sky acreage, hitherto untilled.” Just as the Otis company allowed New Yorkers to begin tilling the sky, the growing population stopped tilling the soil, too tightly packed on the land to continue farming it. The last working farm disappeared from the island in the 1930s. Manhattan grows no crops and raises no cattle. All the food must be shipped in daily. But the wealth being generated on the island–the value created by the work of millions–is enough to pay for the daily delivery of untold tons of food.
Our modern economy and urban geography create vertical pressure. The agrarian societies of Bible times created horizontal pressure. It happened to Abram and Lot. Abram and his nephew were both so wealthy there was not enough land to feed their animals. They had to split up. Abram let Lot choose, and the young man chose the best land, a choice that kicked off a chain of unpleasant events, see Genesis chapters 13, 18, and 19.
Less familiar is the story of the separation of Jacob and Esau. The reconciled twin sons of Isaac grew rich in their old age and faced the same problem: there was not enough grass and water to support their animals. They would have to spread out.
“And Esau took his wives, and his sons, and his daughters, and all the persons of his house, and his cattle, and all his beasts, and all his substance, which he had got in the land of Canaan, and went into the country from the face of his brother Jacob. For their riches were more than that they might dwell together, and the land where they were strangers could not bear them because of their cattle. Thus dwelt Esau in Mount Seir” Genesis 36:6-8.
Stories like this make me sad. Why can’t families be together? Jacob and Esau finally had a good relationship, but their own prosperity forced them to split up.
I remember teaching high school and realizing that I had five cousins who also taught in high schools at the time, and at least half a dozen cousins that were high school students. Yet we were all in different schools–spread out across hundreds of miles. Why didn’t God send us all to the same place, where we could see family every day? Doesn’t that seem like the way things should work?
It may seem that way. But God did not send you here to live a comfortable life in your insulated family bubble. You are here to reach other people, to make a difference. Sometimes God calls us to change jobs, other times to change cities or even nations. My father moved 300 miles for work. My wife’s father, a thousand. Most Americans have ancestors on other continents.
Moving, whether to Lubbock or Lithuania, is simply part of life sometimes, part of the adventure to which God calls us, and for which He will reward us:
“And He said unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God’s sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time and in the world to come, life everlasting” Luke 18:29-30.
AΩ.
- The E.B. White quote is from his 1948 essay now published in book form, HERE IS NEW YORK.
Household Words: 