As We Gather For Our Feast
/Thanksgiving Preparation
Grocery shelves groan under the weight of extra produce that will grace our tables. Pumpkins and butternut squash are piled high. Extra displays are set up with traditional foods for the Thanksgiving table such as sweet potatoes and yams, bags of cranberries, green beans, and stuffing mix for the turkey.
We Remember Our Farmers
It's a holiday for feasting, a celebration of the abundance of the year's harvest. We come together to share our food and to give thanks.
With gratitude for our endless bounty, we also take a moment to remember and thank those who provide all this food for us.
Our farmers.
Paul Harvey, a radio broadcaster from a time when radio was king, delivered a broadcast in 1978 about farmers. It became known by the title, "So God Made A Farmer."
Harvey painted with his words the hard work and humble life of a farmer. A rising sun waits for no one and so, the farmer rises early each day to tend the animals and the fields, no matter what. It's a life that requires resiliency and strength. How many of us would have the fortitude to be a farmer?
God Made A Farmer (text)
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 and 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 and 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. 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 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. 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'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.
–Paul Harvey
Farmers Face Challenges
There are struggles for today's farmers on many levels. Concerns swirl around us such as animal treatment, genetic manipulation of seeds, loss of crop land, and getting food to the hungry, just to name a few. As we become more and more urbanized, there is concern as to who will set up to becpme our next generation of farmers.
We Say Thank You
We also remember the long chain of people who bring the farmers' food to us. Many hands touch the food before we buy it, like people who package it, the truckers and the store workers.
This Thanksgiving holiday, we bow our heads before the beautiful food on our tables and we say thank you to everyone who helped bring it to us.
Photos of the farmers are all
by Paul Mobley from an article in The Morning News.
