Psalm 27 The Lord is my light and my salvation; he protects me from danger—whom shall I fear? 2 When evil men come to destroy me, they will stumble and fall! 3 Yes, though a mighty army marches against me, my heart shall know no fear! I am confident that God will save me.
4 The one thing I want from God, the thing I seek most of all, is the privilege of meditating in his Temple, living in his presence every day of my life, delighting in his incomparable perfections and glory. 5 There I’ll be when troubles come. He will hide me. He will set me on a high rock 6 out of reach of all my enemies. Then I will bring him sacrifices and sing his praises with much joy.
7 Listen to my pleading, Lord! Be merciful and send the help I need.
8 My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me, O my people.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.”
9 Oh, do not hide yourself when I am trying to find you. Do not angrily reject your servant. You have been my help in all my trials before; don’t leave me now. Don’t forsake me, O God of my salvation. 10 For if my father and mother should abandon me, you would welcome and comfort me.
11 Tell me what to do, O Lord, and make it plain because I am surrounded by waiting enemies. 12 Don’t let them get me, Lord! Don’t let me fall into their hands! For they accuse me of things I never did, and all the while are plotting cruelty. 13 I am expecting the Lord to rescue me again, so that once again I will see his goodness to me here in the land of the living.
14 Don’t be impatient. Wait for the Lord, and he will come and save you! Be brave, stouthearted, and courageous. Yes, wait and he will help you.
Nobody likes waiting! Forty years ago, when we were teaching Children’s Church, we learned that we needed to change up our activities at least every 10 minutes because of the kids’ short attention spans. Now with instant social media on phones and tablets and channel changers allowing us to flip through TV programs, adults have even shorter attention spans than those kids did forty years ago. We want instant results, and if they are not forthcoming, we are likely to begin sulking as if the universe owed us something. But God works on different timetables than we do. If you are a farmer or a gardener, you know that you can’t plant seeds today and harvest tomorrow. Each crop has its own timetable, and nothing will speed up that process. Plants need a certain amount of time, sunshine, fertilizer, water, and patience.
When raising children, there are also no instant results, at least not positive ones. One act of cruelty might scar a child for a lifetime but helping children develop character is a slow and sometimes painful process. When several farm families have posted Facebook videos of their kids working on farms, the comments have been vicious. The same parents who think nothing of exposing their kids to violent video games appear to feel qualified to criticize farm families allowing their children to take responsibility.
As a farm kid who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s when farming entailed a lot more hard physical labor, let me share a few of the tasks my brothers and I undertook routinely.
- Carrying feed and water to animals and chickens-we began as soon as we were big enough to handle buckets. Did some of the water slop out? Yes. Did we get wet? Yes. Did we learn? Yes.
- Checking animals in the field to see if they were healthy. Hog confinement setups were rare, and most farmers raised pigs out in the field in hog pastures. I vividly remember riding out in our pickup to remote hog pastures and then running around the pasture, checking to make sure all the pigs appeared healthy and that none of them appeared to be lame or suffering in some other fashion.
- Cleaning the mud out of hog waterers with bare hands-pigs root and bring dirt into their waterers when they drink. The mud must continue to be cleaned by hand. I’m sure there are better watering tanks now, but this was reality. Incidentally, this task even had to be done in winter when the mud was half frozen.
- Gathering eggs-before we sold off our chicken flock, we had 500 chickens and sold our eggs commercially. We gathered eggs twice a day.
- Milking cows by hand-I began milking by hand as soon as my hands were big enough and strong enough, around the age of 8.
- Shoveling off ground feed from the back of a pickup truck. We would send grain into town to the elevator to be ground and then bring it back out. At that point, the feed had to be shoveled by hand into a storage area. I vividly remember shoveling off a half ton of ground feed, one scoop at a time.
- Pitching manure-barns and chicken houses had to be cleaned by hand. Some of us still remember how to handle pitch forks.
- Carrying ground feed and mineral pellets down the center of feed bunks to beef cattle. A five-gallon bucket weighs 25 pounds when full.
- Helping with the family garden. We always had a large garden, and Mom taught us the differences between vegetables and weeds quite early. We learned how to care for vegetables and how to harvest them, handling them gently.
- Driving tractors-my brothers began at age 7 while I was an ancient crone of 10 years. My parents began drilling road safety into us as soon as we got bicycles, and we were not allowed on public roads until we were old enough to drive legally.
- Above all, we learned to work. I don’t recall either of my brothers or I complaining about our tasks; in fact, we felt honored that our parents trusted us with these responsibilities. We were only one generation away from families where some children had to leave school after eighth grade to help support families during the Depression.
One problem faced by those in urban population is that they have become so divorced from the land that they have never learned these lessons. Farming also teaches other lessons, including patience when crops fail or disasters strike. As I am writing this, ranchers in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas are struggling to recover from catastrophic prairie fires that have devastated farms and ranches held in families for several generations. Rebuilding will be difficult; however, these people are spiritually tough because they have had to endure before.
King David faced struggles throughout his lifetime and wrote Psalm 27 out of those experiences. Perhaps today, you feel trapped and wonder if help is ever coming. Remember Psalm 27:14 14 Don’t be impatient. Wait for the Lord, and he will come and save you! Be brave, stouthearted, and courageous. Yes, wait and he will help you.
PRAYER: Father God, thank You for loving us and caring for us. Lord, many of us are crying out, “How long? How long before deliverance comes?” Father, strengthen our hearts and help us to wait and trust where we cannot see. In the mighty and precious Name of King Jesus. Amen.
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