SMOKEHOUSE SPIRITUALITY – GOD FINALLY CALLED ME TO BE A FARMACIST
Well now… I reckon one doesn’t ever quite leave where she or he comes from. I come from a line of healers—though we didn’t always call it that. In a day and a time when big Pharma was not a thing and the most trusted professional in town was the druggist, Pawpaw Copeland stood behind a wooden counter as an apothecary. He compounded powders and measured tonics with a steady hand. My daddy followed him, sixty years a pharmacist in our little hometown, tending folks one prescription at a time. They worked on the far side of sickness, doing their good after the body had already cried out.
And me? I like to say the Lord took one look at my high school chemistry grades and decided I’d best not be trusted with a mortar and pestle—so He called me to preach instead. My little sister got the pharmacy nod and carried on the trusted druggist presence in our hometown with integrity and quiet class.
Fifty years I gave to that calling to preach. Since 1983, I’ve been a proud and thankful ordained United Methodist preacher-pastor type walking with people through joy and grief, sin and grace, birth and burial. It’s a different kind of healing, but healing just the same. And it was certainly seen as an honor and privilege to serve in this way. Then in July of 2025, I laid that work down.
I’ve come to recognize through the years that pastors rarely are “put out to pasture”, but oddly enough, I wanted my next to be all about pastures. It could be said that a calling doesn’t end—it just changes fields.
I knew my “next” would be farming. And I like to say God saw my heart and read my passion, and called me to be a farmacist. Not the kind that leans on sacks and sprays, but the kind that leans low and listens. Farming without the crutch of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. Not just farming without… but farming with—with the soil, with the seasons, with the cover crops, with the watersheds, with the unseen life underfoot, and with the creatures God put here to help tend it. Being a farmacist is all about healing—healing soil that strengthens nutrition that is often depleted in store bought crops and meat. This healing restores health through carefully raised food.
This week I found myself out at Sovereignty Ranch, just outside Bandera, Texas among a gathering of folks who speak the old truths in new words—regeneration, as we now call it. But as I listened, it sounded a whole lot like remembering. Remembering that our family has always been in the healing business.
Speakers stood up and talked about soil not as dirt, but as a living organisms. There was talk about cover crops that don’t just protect the ground but feed it. We came to celebrate the understanding that fruit and vegetables coming out of healthy soil could be bursting with real nutrition. I could “amen” the talk about animals not as units of production, but as partners in the healing of land. And somewhere along the way, a light came on for me—slow and steady, like dawn over a pasture. I give some of the credit to a young woman named Erin Martin Hollingsworth who spoke plainly about food as medicine.
Erin reminded us that if we’ve tried to heal the body without tending the ground it rises from that yields what we eat, then our efforts are close to useless. If the soil is sick, the food is weak. And if the food is weak, the people won’t be strong for long. Furthermore, she pitched for buying locally farm raised instead of shipped food that losses nutrition every day after picking.
My Pawpaw and my daddy worked hard to mend what was broken downstream—but what if the Lord is calling some of us farmacist upstream now? To tend the soil so the sickness doesn’t take hold in the first place and getting an upstream approach. It struck me plain: this, too, is ministry.
Only now the congregation has roots and hooves and wings. The sermon is written in grass and dung and rain. And the healing—Lord willing—works its way from the ground up, quiet and steady and true.
I may have left the pulpit, but I haven’t stopped preaching. I’ve just taken to speaking in rows of non-tilled furrows… in farrowing stalls and lush green clover patches up to my chest. All the while I’m trusting and listening to the soil to say “Amen.”