Mark Manry teaches history, geography, and theology at Rochester College in southeast Michigan. He drug out his formal education in theology at Lipscomb University in Tennessee and history at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK by distracting himself with greater things: his wife and five children, four years of mission work in East Africa, and many hours of manual labor on his ten-acre farmstead in the making. He posts intermittently on Instagram
'SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID
FROM wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_postmeta ON ( wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id )
WHERE 1=1 AND (
wp_posts.ID NOT IN (
SELECT object_id
FROM wp_term_relationships
WHERE term_taxonomy_id IN (47485,47486)
)
) AND (
(
( wp_postmeta.meta_key = \'the_author\' AND wp_postmeta.meta_value = \'3471179\' )
OR
( wp_postmeta.meta_key = \'secondary_author\' AND wp_postmeta.meta_value LIKE \'{a501bf866d878ab663d34f204a73d0795e05e06caea07bc9c82e10a214890a82}\\"3471179\\"{a501bf866d878ab663d34f204a73d0795e05e06caea07bc9c82e10a214890a82}\' )
)
) AND wp_posts.post_type = \'post\' AND ((wp_posts.post_status = \'publish\'))
GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 6'
Cutting a Farm into a Forest
The piece of property on which my story takes place had evolved past neglect: it was simply abandoned to the forest. When we looked out the windows of our old home in the early years, we didn’t see fields onto which we could project agrarian dreams, but walls of vegetation that were wild and unwelcoming. If we wanted to make a farm, we would have to cut it into a forest.
April 5, 2018