Northern Farmer

Blessings come at a constant pace here on the farm as of late. And I’m very humbled and thankful for them all. Today we went to church and it was very good as always. Besides church being a blessing the ride there can be a blessing in itself. We were a couple of miles away from church driving through the hills and low and behold as I was snooping around the different farms I seen the purdiest set of red mules a person could ever set eyes on. Brought a tear to my eye, knowing they weren’t mine. Now I don’t want to covet my neighbor’s goods, but boy, these were tempting me to covet. But a little prayer and a quarter mile further down the road the temptation passed. Maybe someday, eh.

But back to blessings. Now all week on the radio when I’m doing chores in the old lumber wagon of a three quarter ton Chev I was listening to a preacher talking about tithes. For years I would never ever consider giving ten percent to a church, of all things, and I didn’t. But since early this fall I let go and started. A leap of faith I must say. Anyway that preacher on the radio always was talking how your giving would be multiplied back to you in blessing. That I must say from my very limited experience is true. Now farming sometimes can be a difficult thing to figure out ten percent of income with. So I figure I would take our gross income for the year, which isn’t all that big, and just to be on the safe side go at least fifteen percent. Then divide that by fifty two weeks and walla! Actually it’s over fifteen percent, but I want to make sure that it’s well over ten to be on the safe side.

Again, back to blessing, boy can I get sidetracked or what. Now, we get a huge percentage of our total income in January, so you can figure the last few months leading up to January finances are getting a tad bit stretched. Well, here’s a praise that I think came directly from giving in faith. As I was approaching the fifty year mark my health insurance was coming due for another three months. A $2600 deductible, a common farm type policy, still super expensive. Well, this fall I didn’t have any money on hand to pay the tithe with, but I had money set aside for the insurance. So I started using my medical insurance money, in faith that it would somehow be taken care of. Now, when I got the new premium it went up bigtime, because I was turning fifty. I didn’t think of that. So there I was, no money at the time for insurance. Pretty stupid by worldly standard, eh? But even with my tiny faith for some reason I didn’t worry about it. Just about on D-Day, you know, when the insurance is ready to run out, I found out by chance of a different company that would give me a no deductible insurance for less than what I was paying before turning fifty. I’d have to wait until January 1st for it to take effect, but that was no problem. The Lord took that tithe that was for the insurance money and changed everything around for the better. Wow!

One thing that I want to add that I very seldom hear preached on the radio about the blessings of giving is this. We know the promise that we will be blessed abundantly by giving in faith. I think quite a few people don’t see many of the blessings that they get. They happen on the other end of the financial ledger. Many people look for, well, let’s say for example more money or something like that. Sometimes we should recognize the bills and expenses that we don’t get. Instead of looking to receive something we should be aware of not needing. All of a sudden we don’t need this or that expense, hmm, this is getting interesting. As a family we realize we don’t need all the modern gadgets that suck away income. We have more for important things with the same income as before. More available money for the truly important things in life with the same income or even a little less income than before. Out here on the farm I see these things happening, I pretty much know where all the expenses are. I see many evaporating. A blessing can be as simple as God putting an idea in my head. “Do this differently”, and I say that nobody does that around here Lord! And He’ll say “Do this differently”. Ok, well, people will figure I’m some sort of nut but I’ll do it. And it works, wow!

So that’s what’s on my mind on a Sunday evening. We have a very busy week coming up around here. In fact I think it will be the busiest week this winter. We’ll be having company later this week, a couple different times and I’ll be sure to post about both visits. I should have a contest to see if folks can figure out who the two separate visitors will be. First prize to the person that figures em out right would be a box of forage fed beef T-Bones. Of course the box would be pretty small and you’d have to wait till summer for the steer to be butchered and you’d have to come up to Minnesota to claim them, plus you’d have to cook them here so I can eat some too. Sounds fair to me But I’d throw in a lot of fresh stuff from the garden.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.