The day began cool and breezy like most mornings here. It’s my favorite time of day. Today is going to be a good day, I thought. Rice-planting Day! I quickly gobbled down my breakfast of cold rice and got ready to go. I watched my friend Janti and her mom hitch the cows to the cart. Then we loaded the large bags of seed rice and set out at a slow, plodding pace.

Perched on top of a rice bag, I took in the world around me. I could hear wind rustling through the trees, birds singing, and Janti’s grunting to the cows, urging them forward. As she and her mom chatted, I enjoyed the beautiful rise and fall of their language, rolling like the hills around us in the morning light. The hour it took to get to the fields seemed much too short.

As we unloaded, I saw Thame, Janti’s husband, carving the ends of two long sticks into points like giant pencils. Then he and a neighbor man with two pointed sticks of his own began walking slowly up and down the field, jabbing the points into the ground until the whole field was riddled with little holes.

We women and children filled sections of hollow bamboo with seed rice and lined up across the field to begin planting. We moved along, pouring seed into our hands, dropping four or five grains into each hole, and pushing dirt over them with end of our bamboo poles. As we worked our way up the field, the air was full of jokes and laughter. Most of comments were directed toward me. “Ha ha! She knows how to plant rice!” “Haha, an American Pnong!” We all laughed and laughed, bringing joy to an otherwise tedious job.

At noon, we stopped and ate lunch together, which of course included rice. Janti had spent some of her scarce money on some meat, a special treat for everyone there. After lunch, we finished planting the small section that was left, and then I walked back to the village with a few of the neighbors. After everyone had showered, they came back to eat the evening meal of rice together and to share more laughter.

A few days later, I looked out over the planted field and saw a green haze on the ground. The rice was growing! It was very satisfying to see the field that I had worked so hard to help clear, prepare, and plant now growing.

Pnong life revolves around rice. They work so hard clearing the jungle, plowing their fields, planting the rice, weeding it, and harvesting it and threshing it. They eat it every day—breakfast, lunch and supper. In the Pnong language there are two words for eat: cha, which means snacking, and chong, which means eating rice. When you greet someone, you say, “Have you eaten rice yet today?” This means, “Have you eaten a meal?”

As all this was running through my mind, the imagery of Jesus as the Bread of Life suddenly hit me with more clarity than it ever had before. For the Pnong, Jesus is the Rice of Life.

The morning after rice-planting day, I was reading in The Desire of Ages for worship when this passage leapt off the page: “To eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ is to receive Him as a personal Savior believing that He forgives our sins, and that we are complete in Him. It is by beholding His love, by dwelling upon it, by drinking it in, that we are to become partakers of His nature. What food is to the body, Christ must be to the sou … We must feed upon Him, receive Him into the heart, so that His life becomes our life.”

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