God Made A Farmer

 

Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, (born Lorenzo Pietro Berra), May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015, was a professional MLB baseball catcher and outfielder for 19 seasons with ten World Series championship rings to his account. He also contributed his talents as a coach and manager for several years. Yogi has been renowned for his “Yogi-isms,” and I just like to throw in a few every now and then. * “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” * “You can observe a lot by watching.” * “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.” * “I never said most of the things I said.” * “Baseball is ninety percent mental, and the other half is physical.”

One of the great American radio broadcasters, Paul Harvey, September 4, 1918 – February 28, 2009, will always be remembered for his short quips and witty stories that could make us laugh uncontrollably or be so heartwarming could bring a tear to our eye. He educated the world with, “The Rest of the Story” and shocked the world with his essay, “If I Were the Devil” in 1965. As a great philosopher of life, he shared many thought-provoking shorts of which my favorite is one he borrowed from Horace Porter, “There are far too many people in charge that are “educated beyond their intelligence.” Sad but true.

As I witness thievery of farmland and regulations driving the farmer out of business along with another apparent long season of draught ahead, I’m reminded of another Paul Harvey essay, “So God Made a Farmer.” (Admittedly, not Biblical, but one bringing honor to the hard-working soul of the farmer and his family without whom we could not survive.)

On the eighth day, God looked down on His planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer. God said, “I need somebody to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the schoolboard.” So God made a farmer. “I need someone with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Someone to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait for lunch until his wife’s done feeding, visit with ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon – and mean it.” So God made a farmer. God said, “I need someone 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 axe 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. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, 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 someone strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, 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. It had to be someone who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Someone 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 the hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to church. Somebody who’d 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 he wants to spend his life ‘doing what dad does’” So God made a farmer. As Paul Harvy would say, “And now you know the rest of the story.”