This is a Farmer

On Sunday Pastor Benedix retired. He has ministered at our church (Peace Lutheran Church ~ Filer, Idaho) for the last 30 years, not to mention the time he and his family spent abroad as missionaries. He will be greatly missed but we all hope he and his wife enjoy retirement….well for as much as pastors retire.

This is a link to the article in the local paper on his retirement. (share)

Since it was his final Sunday lets just say the church was packed and then some. We were running a little late because we left our potluck dish sitting on the kitchen counter and had to turn around mid-trip to retrieve it. Because of our late arrival we ended sitting up in the Choir Loft with Susan, the organist and a handful of other late comers (mostly folks with young children…hmmmmm).

The Choir Loft isn’t used for seating too much except during special occasions and Kevin found a funeral bulletin tucked inside his hymnal. Nothing too out of the ordinary for a funeral bulletin, but there was a poem printed on the inside that struck his fancy, so he brought it home. It is about farmers, and I thought I would share it since several of the folks who read this are or have ties to this way of life.

This is a Farmer

“Farmers are found in fields plowing up, seeding down, returning from, planting to, fertilizing with, spraying for, and harvesting it. Wives help them, boys follow them, the Agriculture Department confuses them, salesmen detain them, meals wait for them, weather can delay them, but it takes Heaven to stop them.

When it’s time to buy a new truck he can quote from memory every expense involved in operating the farm last year, plus the added expenses his is certain will crop up this year. He instinctively coverts the price to the pounds of pork he must produce in order to pay for it at today’s prices.

A Farmer is a shirt-sleeved executive with his home his office; a scientist using fertilizer attachments; a purchasing agent wearing a cap; a personnel director with grease on his hands; a nutritionist with a concern for energy values, animals, and antibiotics. As a production expert he’s faced with a surplus; while as a manager he’s always battling a price cost squeeze handling more capital than most of the businessmen on Main Street. he’s not much for droughts, ditches, disease, weeds, experts, the four-day week, helping with housework, or bugs.

Nobody else is so far from the telephone or so close to God. His greatest fringe benefit is that his family shares his business life. He’s himself; you’ll never find him trying to appear as something he’s not.

Who else can remove all those things from his pockets and on washday still have overlooked five washers, a rusty bolt, three feed pellets, the stub of a lead pencil, and an old receipt.

A Farmer is both faith and fatalist-he must have faith to continually meet the challenges of his capacities amid ever present possibilities that an act of God (a late spring, and early frost, blight, tornado, hail, flood, drought) can bring his business to a standstill.

He is privileged to see the sun rise through smog-free air and to walk under an open sky. His closeness to nature strengthens his faith. By his hand alone he produces enough to feed so many it makes his production capacity the envy of the rest of the world. You can reduce his acreage, but you can’t restrain his ambition. Even when his spirit is low and things seem bleak, he can be recharge anew when he hears “The market is up.”