Wolverine

A Farmer Needs the Courage of a Wolverine and the Wisdom of Solomon

Ed, my neighbor next door, tells me it keeps getting harder and harder to be a farmer. The tightrope walk between profit and loss is slipperier than ever. Crop diversification calls for the ready courage of a wolverine to take on new crops and seed varieties. Not even Solomon in all his wisdom could foresee how the price for crops will turn out at harvest time. Throw in bad weather like hail, add machinery problems and it’s time to find extra courage and wisdom. Problem is that no one has any courage or wisdom to spare when a person is all out of them. I told Ed this isn’t just a problem for farmers. Every one runs out of courage and wisdom, just like running out of milk and eggs.

Living our lives can demand more courage and wisdom than we have stockpiled. A trip to the doctor can take more courage than we may have. When we are facing tests and treatments, or physical therapy with no cure in sight, we can find ourselves without the courage and wisdom to keep going. Situations and problems come along where nothing we do makes a bit of difference. It is like driving on a treacherously icy road and control of the car slips away from us. Then we spin around and are heading in the wrong lane at oncoming traffic. Our best-planned lives get out of control and leave us at the bottom, rather than at the top. We want to be first in line, but are last.

Perhaps we do tend to snarl and storm our way through life like a wolverine. We attack our days with an attitude that we will do what needs to be done. We thoughtlessly do what we have done before, as if repetition is always wise. Change trips us up and most of us resist major changes unless we have no choice. It is hard to have humility and put our faith in God to remedy a problem that we are set on fixing ourselves.

In the Bible, there was a woman who was subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. When she heard of Jesus, she was totally humbled at her own efforts to heal her bleeding. She was wise enough to believe that if Jesus could heal others, he could heal her. She thought, if I have the courage to come up behind him and touch his cloak, I’ll be healed. That is what she did and immediately her bleeding stopped and she was freed from her years of suffering.

In the wisdom of God, Jesus realized power to heal had gone out from him and stopped, turned around and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” The woman came and told him the truth – that she had touched him for healing. Jesus said, “Your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

It takes courage and wisdom to ask God for help after we have the humility to admit that we need help from Him.

 

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