Today was so pretty and so pleasant for porch sitting and swing pondering. I watched the birds and the butterflies enjoying the feeders and flowers and the warm yellow sunshine on this beautiful blue sky Sunday that God created. I spent the day doing absolutely nothing but enjoying being on the porch. After supper I went outside again to watch the setting sun. Mother Nature was painting a pale pink sky and the sun lay her head down under a subdued quilt of pale pink and light blue. Father Sky kissed her good night and woke the moon and hung the stars but the clouds hid them from my view.

Been thinking the last few days about a speech Paul Harvey made about farmers. I read it on a friend’s blog several weeks ago and I think it’s beautiful and describes the hard working American farmer in perfect detail. We certainly take our farmers for granted and most children when asked where milk comes from would probably say, “Walmart!” Paul Harvey spoke at a sales meeting at Russell Corporation years ago. Chief enjoyed talking with him.

Here is Paul Harvey’s Speech at the National FFA Convention in November of 1978, titled So God Made a Farmer — And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker,” so God made a farmer. God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board,”— so God made a Farmer.

“I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild; somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife’s done feeding visiting ladies, then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon — and mean it,” — so God made a Farmer.

God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt,  and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps; who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, and then pain’n from tractor back, put in another seventy-two hours,” — so God made a Farmer.

God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds, and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor’s place — so God made a Farmer.

God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark,” — so God made a Farmer.

It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners; somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to church; somebody who would bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh, and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life “doing what dad does,” — so God made a Farmer.

God is a farmer, too. He plants seeds of faith in our hearts and we nurture these seeds of faith through prayers and thanksgiving. In the Bible, 2 Corinthians 9:6 says, “Remember this — a farmer who plants only a few seeds will get a small crop. But the one who plants generously will get a generous crop.” We can’t wait for perfect weather for planting or harvesting. Every Christian is a farmer and farming is a venture of faith. We are the caretakers of God’s words and his world. We need to spread his seeds of love and grace and gather together as caretakers of the earth and its inhabitants. We are God’s farmers.