Your Soul Needs You To Do Something That Won't Compute
Midweek Meditations
Your Soul Needs You To Do Something That Won’t Compute
by Jason G. Edwards
The Age of Abnormal
The economy runs on attention now. Not beauty. Not truth. Just clicks.
The louder, the faster, the more agitating, the better. Every platform is a slot machine. Every conversation is a chance to curate your brand. Even acts of love are sometimes bent toward visibility. Did you post it? Did they like it? Did it go viral?
I once heard someone say, “We’ve lived in the abnormal so long, we’ve started calling it normal.” We’ve mistaken anxiety for vigilance. Burnout for passion. Constant noise for connection. And now we’re all exhausted, half-alive, watching our lives unfold like breaking news we can’t turn off.
So what do we do when the metrics of modern life no longer make sense to the soul?
Maybe we need to do something that won’t compute.
That’s the line that caught me—buried in a poem written decades ago by a Kentucky farmer who never joined Twitter, never optimized his productivity, never tried to go viral. Wendell Berry is one of the few voices I trust when the world starts spinning too fast. He’s not just a poet. He’s a soul whisperer. A tractor mystic. A faithful witness to things that grow slow and matter deeply. And in Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, he offers what I can only describe as gospel—though not the sanitized kind.
This is gospel in overalls. This is good news that smells like compost. This is a word for anyone tired of performing, striving, scrolling, and pretending. And the first invitation, the first crack of light is this: “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.”
The Real Madness
At first glance, it’s Berry who sounds mad. He tells us to love someone who doesn’t deserve it. To plant sequoias we’ll never see grow. To give our approval to all we cannot understand. This is not how the modern world works. This is not efficient. It doesn’t scale. This will not boost engagement. It just doesn’t compute.
But the longer you sit with his words, the more you begin to wonder: what if the madness isn’t in the poem—but in us?
What if the frantic pace we’ve normalized is actually killing something essential? What if the systems we rely on to measure value—how fast, how loud, how many followers—are broken compasses?
The Mad Farmer dares us to believe that he’s not the delusional one. We are.
He looks at a world where beauty is a commodity, time is monetized, and relationships are curated for impact, and says: No, thank you. I’ll walk backward into mystery. I’ll plant my life in the soil. I’ll waste my time on love.
“Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.”
That’s a line that should be carved into sanctuary walls. Because this is where the gospel starts to echo—not in certainty, but in contradiction. Paul said it best: “The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:25). Jesus, let’s not forget, told parables so perplexing they left religious experts blinking in the sun. He praised the poor. Embraced the outcasts. Washed the feet of his friends. Cried in public. Died on purpose.
This is not the behavior of someone trying to build a platform. This is someone tearing up the blueprints and planting wildflowers in the rubble. It’s the behavior of someone who sees the world differently. Someone who came not to fix the machine, but to interrupt it. Someone who thought lilies were better than spreadsheets.
And so we arrive at the real spiritual tension of the moment—not between belief and unbelief, but between what we’ve been told is normal and what our souls are quietly begging us to remember.
Practicing Resurrection
The poem ends with a dare:
“Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection.”
It’s the kind of line that makes you stop. It feels like nonsense—until it doesn’t.
What does it mean to practice resurrection? Not to explain it. Not to defend it. Not to wait passively for it after death. But to live now as if it were already underway. As if dead things still come back to life. As if love wins, even when it looks like it’s lost. As if God is not an idea to believe, but a life to embody.
Jesus called it abundant life—not one lived elsewhere in some distant heaven, but here, in the middle of the mess. “I came that they may have life,” he says, “and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
Paul called it “the life that is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:19). Not the frantic accumulation of comfort or clout, but the quiet courage to invest your life in something you may never see grow. That kind of life doesn’t show up in metrics. It shows up in mercy. It’s not measured by clicks, but by compassion. Not productivity, but presence.
To practice resurrection is to live as if love is still the strongest force in the universe—even when the evidence says otherwise. It might look like staying instead of ghosting. Resting instead of hustling. Forgiving when no one says sorry.
Visiting the grave.
Baking the bread.
Showing up, again.
It might look like what Eugene Peterson called “the unforced rhythms of grace”—the slow, sacred strangeness of walking with Jesus when your soul and your calendar disagree.
But resurrection has an edge. It’s not cozy. It’s not sentimental. It’s disruptive. It means going against everything that told you to quit feeling, quit caring, quit hoping. In a world that rewards apathy and speed, resurrection looks like madness. And that’s the whole point.
The Mad Farmer is not offering us a performance. He’s offering us a way home. He’s not telling us to go big. He’s telling us to go deep—to bury our lives in the things that last: love, wonder, generosity, forgiveness, soil. In other words, to live like Jesus.
Which is why I sometimes wonder—when I read this poem slowly enough, honestly enough—if maybe the Mad Farmer is Jesus. Or at least a cousin. Or maybe just a man who wandered into the Beatitudes and never came out.
A Benediction for the Beautifully Unreasonable
So, friends— Buy the field. Bake the bread. Call your father. Or your mother. Or the friend you lost touch with after the last election.
Cancel something. Water something. Stay longer than makes sense. Leave earlier than they expect. Waste your time loving someone who won’t make a single difference in your résumé.
This—this small, defiant, unreasonable tenderness—is how we practice resurrection.
In a world that’s addicted to what computes, be the one who composts. In a world that demands outcomes, be the one who cultivates wonder. In a world built on fear, be the one who laughs like the war is already over—because in some mysterious way, it is.
The invitation is not to make it big, but to make it matter.
Follow the Mad Farmer into the unreasonable rhythm of forgiveness. Follow him into a field where the math breaks down and the mercy breaks open. Follow him—not because it’s safe, or smart, or strategic—but because your soul is starving for something real.
The world will keep shouting, “Get ahead! Be efficient! Stay angry!”
But you don’t have to listen. There’s another voice—quieter, wilder—saying: “Come to me. Walk with me. Watch how I do it.” (Matt. 11: 28-30, MSG)
That voice will never go viral. But it will make you alive.
So, plant sequoias.
Practice resurrection.
And for God’s sake (and yours!), do something—today—that just won’t compute.
You can find a copy of Wendell Berry’s poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front here: https://allpoetry.com/poem/12622463-Manifesto–The-Mad-Farmer-Liberation-Front-by-Wendell-Berry