I don’t know whether you’ve ever walked over a piece of ground that could almost cry out to you and say, “Heal me, heal me!” I don’t know whether you feel the closeness to the soil that I do. But when you fill in those old gullies and terrace the fields and you begin to feel the springiness of the sod beneath your feet and you see that old land come to life, and when you walk through a little old pine forest that you set out in little seedlings and now you see them reaching for the sky and hear the wind through them . . . Men say to you, “Why don’t you sell it and move away?” They might as well ask you, “Why don’t you sell your mother?” Somehow God has made us out of this old soil and we go back to it and we never lose its claim on us.

Eight decades later, the eroded piece of land Clarence Jordan turned into Koinonia Farm has come a long way.