Bulletin
1930, A Year for Growing…?
1930, A Year for Growing…?
Dwayne Laws writes the following:
“The nation was in the midst of the Great Depression and drought in 1930. I was 15. My mother and I lived alone on a small, west Tennessee farm with whatever abilities an ignorant boy, a widowed mother, and one mule and a plow could muster. That fall the rainfall had been so little that the planter tracks could still be seen.
After a tiring, fruitless day, mother sat by the coal oil lamp reading of God's love for man. With all the impatience of a teen-age boy I halted her reading from the thumb-worn Bible with this question:
"Mother, you tell me God loves us. He has a funny way of showing it! We have worked our fingers to the bone for the entire growing season, yet we will harvest little from these parched fields. We have done all man can do. All this soil needs is rain, which only God can send. If God loves us, why doesn't he make it rain?"
With the patience which comes only from faith and years of trials, mother paused, raised her head from the pages of her beloved word of God and replied, "Son, you are making a serious mistake. You are assuming that God is interested in growing cotton and corn. He isn't! He can do that without you and me. God is interested in growing men. I dare say that, in future years, if God grants such to you, you will look back on 1930 as a terrible year for growing corn and cotton. But, if you learn the message God is teaching, you will recall this depression year as a great one for growing men!"
Mother was right.
1. Want (or need) teaches what abundance can never know. Without a drought and a mother who understood it, I might never have known, "My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9)” and “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4).
2. Secondly, do we love getting presents or the one who gives presents? Are we a consumer of God, or commune-r with God? Can you say out loud the following verses, and be sincere when saying it? “Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth. … But as for me, the nearness of God is my good…” (Psa. 73:25 -28). Have the trials of life brought you closer to God or farther away? Maybe it is time we change the way we look at things, and look at them the way God looks at them.
Dan Peters
- 1930_A_Year_for_Growing_WORD.docx (10.07 kB)
