The same Bible that told you Israel would one day become a nation again also tells that you a day’s wages won’t even buy a loaf of bread. I didn’t know that verse was in there until a box showed up on my porch last Tuesday with no letter inside it. Just seeds, and one sheet of paper with four verses written on it in handwriting I have known for thirty years.
The man who mailed it used to be my pastor.
Nobody at our church has heard from him in two years.
I am writing this down because of what he said when he finally answered the phone, and because everything he described is in the news right now.
Let me say one thing before I go further.
I am not one of those end times people. I have never once stood in a grocery store and thought about the book of Revelation. I am a grandmother who has read her Bible her whole life and who mostly reads the Psalms.
So you can take this or leave it. I only want to tell you what happened.
Pastor Wendell came to our church in 1994.
He married my daughter Rachel. He buried my mother. He baptized both of my grandchildren, one of them in a pond because the baptistry was being repaired that spring.
I need you to understand what kind of man he is, because it matters to everything that comes after.
In thirty years in that pulpit I never heard him preach one sermon about the end of the world.
Not one. He thought it made people strange. He used to say that the Lord gave us Tuesday to be faithful in and we should start there.
He went on a mission trip in the spring of 2024.
He came back different.
Quiet in a way he had not been. Short with people. He preached three Sundays in a row on the same passage in Genesis, which he had never done before in his life.
By that fall he had stepped down, sold his house, and moved to Montana.
He did not send a letter. He did not do a farewell dinner. He answered his phone for about a month and then he stopped answering it at all.
Our church decided he had burned out. A few people said breakdown. One man said he thought Wendell had lost his faith over there and was too proud to say so.
I want to be honest with you. I was relieved to have an explanation. I told Rachel he had probably seen too much poverty and it had broken something in him.
She said, "Mom, he went off the deep end."
And I let that be the answer for two years.
Then last Tuesday there was a box on my porch.
Inside it was a sealed vault of seeds, heavier than I expected. Under the lid was a piece of notebook paper folded in half.
No letter. No explanation. Four verses in his handwriting.
Revelation 6:5 and 6. Matthew 20:2. Genesis 1:11. Matthew 24.
I sat on my porch step and read that paper probably ten times.
Then I called the only number I have for him.
He did not answer Tuesday. He did not answer Wednesday.
He answered Thursday afternoon.
The first thing he said was, "I wondered if you would call."
I asked him what the box was.
He said, "Did you read the paper?"
I said I read it and I did not understand it.
And he said, "Then let me tell you where I have been, and you can decide what you think of me after."
I want to give you what he said the way he said it, because I wrote it down that night while I still had it.
The trip was supposed to be two weeks. It turned into most of a summer, across three places, and he said he did not understand what he was looking at until he had seen the third one.
The first was Sri Lanka.
He said the government there banned chemical fertilizer. Not because of a war. Not because of weather. A decision, on paper, announced with good reasons attached to it.
The next harvest came in short. A country that had been feeding itself started buying rice from other countries instead, and the price of food went up so fast that people who had been fine the year before were standing in line.
He said, "Nobody was punished for that decision. Nobody resigned. It was just a policy, and then there was no food."
The second was Venezuela.
He said the shortage there did not look like a famine in a photograph. It looked like paperwork.
Ration cards. A limit on what one person could buy. Days of the week assigned to you by the last number on your identification card, so you could not simply go when you needed to.
He said the part he could not get out of his head was how normal everyone acted about it. Mothers standing in line on their assigned day, checking their phones, waiting their turn to be handed what they were allowed to have.
The third was Nigeria.
He said that one showed him the piece he had been missing, which is what happens when the ships stop.
Imports got restricted. A city that ate rice that came in on boats did not suddenly grow its own. Prices in the market doubled in a matter of weeks, and then doubled again, and the people who got through it were the ones with something growing in the dirt behind the house.
Then he said the thing that made me sit down.
He said, "Three countries. Fertilizer in the first one. Rationing in the second one. Shipping in the third one. Not one of the three started with a drought. Every one of them started with a decision made by somebody who was never going to stand in that line."
I asked him what any of that had to do with him quitting.
He said, "Because on the plane home I read Matthew 24 and I noticed the word order for the first time in my life."
He asked me to go get my Bible and read it out loud to him, and I did, standing in my kitchen.
"And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars."
"For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines."
He said, "Wars first. Then famine. Not at the same time. After."
He said he had preached that chapter for thirty years as something that happens later, to somebody else, in a time none of us would live to see, and he had never once read it as an order of events with a place in it where we are standing right now.
I said the news has been nothing but talks and deals for months. Every week they say they are close to something.
And he said, "Read First Thessalonians five, three."
I looked it up.
"For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them."
He said, "Count how many times you have heard the word peace this year. That verse is not a prediction about some future broadcast. It is a description of the sound it makes right before."
Then he told me to turn to Revelation 6, which is the verse on the paper, and read the third seal.
"And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand."
He asked me what balances are.
I said scales.
He said, "Right. And what do people use scales for."
I said weighing things.
He said, "You weigh what is short. Nobody weighs what there is plenty of."
Then he had me read the next line.
"A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine."
He said, "Now read Matthew twenty, two. The second verse on that paper."
It is the parable of the men hired to work in the vineyard. The owner agrees with them for a penny a day.
A penny was a day of work.
And a measure of wheat was a penny.
He did not explain it to me. He let me sit there with my finger on the page and work out that a man was going to labor from morning until night for one measure of wheat, and go home with nothing else.
I said, "That is groceries."
He said, "That is groceries."
Then he said, "There is a second half of that verse that nobody ever quotes. Hurt not the oil and the wine. The bread gets weighed. The expensive things are left alone. When it starts here, the flour and the rice will have a limit sign on the shelf and the specialty aisle will be full."
He said I had already seen a version of it in 2020, and that I had told myself it was temporary, and that I would tell myself the same thing again.
I did not have an answer for that, because he was right. I did tell myself that.
He asked if I wanted him to stop. I said no.
So he told me to read Ezekiel four, sixteen, which is not a verse I had ever read in my life.
"They shall eat bread by weight, and with care."
Bread by weight.
That is a limit per customer. That is a sign taped to an empty shelf. Written down thousands of years before anybody built a grocery store.
Then he said, "Now let me tell you what I think about the water everybody is watching on the news."
He said the strait they keep showing on the map is not only about gasoline. Fertilizer moves through that same water. The stuff that makes food grow in the quantities this country eats comes in on ships.
He told me to read Revelation 18.
The chapter lists what stops. Wheat is on the list, right there in the merchandise.
And then this.
"Every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off."
And, "For in one hour so great riches is come to nought."
He said, "Sailors standing off at a distance watching it come to nothing. That is not a modern idea. Somebody wrote that down when the biggest ship on earth had oars."
Then he said, "Now go to the last verse on the paper, and this is the one I mailed you a box about."
Genesis 1:11.
"And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself."
Whose seed is in itself.
He said, "Eleven verses into the Bible, every plant on this earth is given the next plant inside it. That is the design. A seed makes a plant and the plant makes seeds and it never has to ask anybody for permission."
Then he asked me if I had a grape in the house.
I said I did.
He said, "Go cut one open. I will wait."
I put the phone on speaker and set it on the counter and cut one of my grapes in half with a paring knife.
Nothing.
I cut another one. Nothing.
I went and got the watermelon out of the refrigerator, the one I had cut for my grandson on Sunday, and there was not a seed in it.
The mandarins. Nothing.
I stood in my own kitchen with a knife in my hand and I could not find a seed in any fruit I owned.
He said, "I spat watermelon seeds off my grandmother’s porch every summer of my childhood. So did you."
I said my grandchildren have never done that once.
He said, "It took about twenty years and nobody announced it. And there is a patent, and you can look it up tonight, for seed engineered to go sterile after one season. Seed built to die."
He let that sit.
Then he said, "Somebody spent money to undo the eleventh verse of the Bible, and they did it while we were all arguing about other things."
I asked him who he meant by somebody.
He said he was not going to give me a theory, and that he had stopped doing that when he stopped preaching. He said he would rather I read a document.
Then he asked me a question.
He said, "Have you ever heard of Agenda 2030?"
I said I had heard the name somewhere and had no idea what it was.
He said, "Everybody has heard the name. Almost nobody has read it. And your fruit bowl is a page out of it."
Here is what he told me it is, and I have since read it myself, so I am not repeating a rumor.
Agenda 2030 is a real United Nations document. Not a video somebody made. Not a theory off the internet. It is published on the United Nations’ own website, it was agreed to by the member nations, and the full name of it is Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The deadline is in the title. 2030.
And running all the way through it is food. Remaking food systems. Who grows food, how it gets grown, what gets planted, what gets phased out.
He said, "They did not hide any of it. They printed it, they put a date on it, and they assumed nobody would read it. They were mostly right."
Then he said, "Now do the arithmetic that matters. Count the growing seasons between this fall and 2030."
I counted them on my kitchen calendar while he waited.
There are three.
He said, "Three springs. That is not a long time to learn something you have never done."
He told me one more thing about it that I did not want to hear. He said Sri Lanka did not ban that fertilizer out of nowhere. It was done in the name of the same kind of targets that document is built on, and announced as progress, and the people who made that decision were not the ones who stood in the rice line afterward.
He said one more verse about that and then he let it go.
Revelation 17. The kings of the earth have one mind, and give their power and their strength to the same thing.
He said, "You do not need a villain. You need to notice that nations making the same decision at the same time is in the book, and that it is happening on a schedule somebody published."
Then he said the part that I think about the most.
He said, "Look around your kitchen. Everything in it needed somebody’s permission to be there. Somebody’s truck, somebody’s store, somebody’s payment system, somebody’s policy. And Revelation thirteen says the day comes when no man might buy or sell without permission."
He said, "Seed in a closet is the one thing in your house that does not need anyone’s approval next spring."
I asked him what he wanted me to do about any of it.
And he said, "What Joseph did."
He said Joseph was not a prophet in that chapter. He was an administrator who believed a warning and filled the storehouses while there was still grain to put in them, in the years when it was easy and nobody thanked him for it.
Then he said, "Read Genesis forty one, thirty. All the plenty shall be forgotten. That is the part people miss. It gets forgotten. Nobody can remember afterward that it was ever easy."
Then he said it plainer than he had said anything else that night.
He said, "I am going to tell you exactly what I am doing, and I want you to do the same thing. Grow your own food. Start this season. Not the one after it."
I told him I did not know how to answer that. I am sixty nine years old and the only thing I have ever kept alive is a peace lily on the hall table.
He said, "I know. That is why I mailed you the box instead of a letter."
He walked me through it like he was reading me a recipe.
He said, "Open it. Do not plant all of it. That is the first thing people get wrong."
He said the vault is meant to sit sealed in a cool dark closet and keep for years, so that whenever the day comes that you need it, it is already in the house. That is the whole reason it exists. It is not groceries. It is the ability to make groceries.
Then he said, "But plant a little of it this season anyway."
I asked him why, if the point is to have it stored.
He said, "Because you do not want the first time you ever grow food to be the year you have to."
He said pick three easy things. Lettuce. Green beans. Tomatoes. Put them in this year while the stores are still full and nothing depends on it, kill some of them, learn what your window looks like, and then you will know what you are doing when it matters.
I said, "Wendell, I do not have a garden. I have a back yard the size of a parking space."
He said, "Then use pots. Every single thing in that box will grow in a five gallon bucket with a hole drilled in the bottom. I have people in an apartment in Billings growing tomatoes and lettuce on a concrete step that gets four hours of sun."
He said potting soil out of a bag. Water. Sunlight. Three things.
He said the seeds come up in a few days and the first time you see them come up you will understand why he could not stop talking about the eleventh verse.
I told him about my back, because I cannot kneel on the ground anymore and I have not been able to for four years.
He said, "Set the buckets on a table. Waist height. You will never bend over once. And let your grandchildren do the planting, they are better at it than we are and they will remember doing it for the rest of their lives."
I asked him what happens if I kill all of them.
He said, "Then you will have killed a couple of dollars of seed in a year when it did not cost you anything to learn. That is the cheapest lesson available to a person right now."
And I asked him the question I really wanted to ask, which is what if none of this ever happens.
He said, "Then you will have a box of seed in a closet that cost you less than a tank of gas and one shelf of space, and I will look like a man who moved to Montana for no reason. I have made peace with that."
Then he stopped being gentle about it, and this is the only time in the whole call that he did.
He said, "But if it does happen, and you have not done this, you are going to be standing in a line on your assigned day with a card in your hand, holding what somebody decided to give you. I watched thousands of mothers do exactly that. I am not willing to picture you in it."
He said, "Seed is not a hobby. It is the difference between waiting to be fed and feeding yourself."
I did not say anything for a minute.
Then he said, "One more thing, and this is the part where most people get taken."
He said the seed has to be heirloom.
He said hybrid seed is what most companies sell, and hybrid seed comes back weak the second year or does not come back at all, which means you are buying it again every spring on somebody else’s terms.
He said, "Heirloom means the harvest gives you next year’s seed for free. One box, and you are never buying seed again. That is the eleventh verse working the way it was set up to work, and it is the only kind worth putting in a closet."
I asked him why nobody at church was talking about any of this.
He said, "Matthew twenty four, thirty eight. They were eating and drinking and marrying, and knew not until the flood came. It does not say they were wicked. It says they did not know. That is all. They were busy."
Then he said, "And that is why I am not angry at any of you for what you decided about me."
I told him what Rachel had said about the deep end.
He laughed for the first time in the whole call and said, "She is not wrong to be careful. Tell her a prudent man foreseeth the evil. Proverbs twenty two, three. And tell her the rest of it, because the rest of it is the part that ought to worry a person. The simple pass on, and are punished."
I asked him why he mailed the box now.
He bought his own two years ago, when he got home, before any of this was on the news.
He said, "Because they are getting hard to get."
He told me most of the outfits that were selling heirloom seed a few years ago are not selling it anymore, one way or another, but that the one he uses is still shipping.
I asked him what he meant by one way or another.
He said, "someone doesn’t want us to have these."
And he left it there, and I did not ask again.
Then he said something a preacher raising money would never say.
He said, "Do not take my word for one thing I have told you. Most of what gets sold to people who are worried is junk. Do not buy anything because I said it."
He told me to do four things instead.
One. Read Revelation six, five and six. Then read Matthew twenty, two. Work out on paper what a penny bought and what a penny paid for a day of work.
Two. Cut a grape open. Then read Genesis one, eleven.
Three. Look up that plan on the site of the people who published it and count the growing seasons left.
Four. Read Matthew twenty four, and then watch the evening news, and decide for yourself which part of the order we are standing in.
He said, "If all four of those come back the way I think they will, then get seed. Not because of me. Because you checked."
He asked me not to tell anyone he called.
I have not, until this.
Here is what I did over the next three days.
I read the two verses at my kitchen table with a pencil and did the arithmetic and it came out exactly the way he said it would.
I found that document on the website of the people who wrote it. The year is right there in the title.
I counted the growing seasons left on my kitchen calendar, and it is not very many.
And Friday night I sat down in front of the news with my husband and heard a man in a suit say the word peace twice in one segment, and for the first time in my life it did not sound like good news to me.
My husband told me Thursday that I was being dramatic.
He read the paper out of the box himself on Saturday morning. Not the verses, the handwriting. He knows that handwriting too. Wendell married us.
He did not say anything for a long time.
Then he went out to the garage and came back and asked me where the seeds were going to go, because the closet in the hall gets warm in the summer.
That is what agreement looks like in this house. No conversation. He just started solving it.
I ordered one vault for our house, one for Rachel, one for my son Kevin, and one for my sister Jo Ann.
That is when I understood why he mailed boxes to families he baptized instead of quietly keeping his seed in a closet in Montana.
First Timothy five, eight. If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith.
He was not being generous. He believed he was under an obligation.
Then I did the thing I feel worst about.
I waited three days before I told anybody outside my family, because I did not want to be the woman at church who sends everybody links.
When I finally sent it to the fourteen women in my Sunday school class, eleven of them wrote back within the hour that it was out of stock.
I checked it myself and it was.
It came back Tuesday morning. I do not know for how long and neither does anybody else.
I sat at my table feeling like a fool for waiting three days to tell people I have sat beside for twenty years.
The vault he sent me is made by a company called Rivanta. They sell it directly on their own site, not in stores and not on Amazon. Over sixteen thousand seeds, thirty five garden varieties, mostly vegetables, sealed so it keeps for years in a cool dark closet.
It is under forty dollars, and if you do not want it they take it back.
Wendell told me plainly that it is forty dollars of seed and a job to do, not a miracle. Most of it stays sealed in the closet. A little of it goes in a bucket on my back step this month so that I know what I am doing before I have to know what I am doing.
That is all he asked of me, and it is all I am asking of you.
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If you have read your Bible your whole life, read those four verses tonight before you decide anything about me or about him.
A prudent man foreseeth the evil.
The simple pass on.
P.S. On the stock, because eleven women from my class could not get one this week. It goes in and out, and it has been doing that since the spring, and it moves every time something new happens in the news. Check whether they actually have them before you decide anything. And understand what late costs on this one. Being early costs forty dollars. Being late costs a growing season, and there is nobody on this earth who can sell you a season back.
P.P.S. Rachel called me Sunday night. She had cut a grape open in her own kitchen with her daughter standing there. She did not apologize for what she said about him and I did not ask her to. She ordered two, one for her house and one for her husband’s mother.
P.P.P.S. What is actually in it. Over sixteen thousand heirloom seeds. Thirty five varieties, mostly vegetables. Sealed for long storage in a cool dark closet. Heirloom means the seed from this year’s harvest grows next year’s garden, which is the only reason any of this matters. Under forty dollars. Free shipping. They take it back if you do not want it.
P.P.P.P.S. On not having anywhere to put a garden, because that was my first thought and it was wrong. A five gallon bucket with a hole in the bottom, a bag of potting soil, and four hours of sun on a step or a balcony rail will grow tomatoes, beans and lettuce. Set the buckets on a table if you cannot kneel, the way I cannot. Wendell has people doing this on an apartment step in Billings. You are not being asked to become a farmer. You are being asked to put three buckets somewhere and learn on them this season.
P.P.P.P.P.S. If you are thinking you will just buy canned goods instead, I thought that too. Wendell’s answer was one sentence. Cans are a number that only goes down. A seed is the only thing you can put in that closet that makes more of itself, and that is not a sales pitch, that is Genesis one, eleven. A pantry is a countdown. A garden is a supply.
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. The verse I cannot get out of my head is not one of the four he wrote down. It is Revelation thirteen, seventeen. That no man might buy or sell. Everything in my kitchen this morning needed somebody’s permission to be there. The seed in my hall closet is the only thing in this house that does not need anyone’s permission to become food next spring.
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