Buffalo Gal

I am always amused when people get serious about praying….there is a lot of e-mail and things on news sites about prayers going up for rain in the drought stricken middle part of the nation.
One article said that Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture and former Iowa governor, told Pres. Obama that he was “on his knees” every day praying for rain for the droughted – out states in the USA.
This made me recall good conversation we had with an very elderly friend in the 1990s. We met him and his little wife at our church and Nels was a wise Christian Believer. My husband took him on a long car ride one summer back to Northeastern ND near Langdon where he had grown up on his fathers’ farm and where he had been a farmer for years and years before his retirement.
Nels was well into his 90s when they went for that ride. They talked about the ups and downs of farming over his many years of doing it.
The subject of drought came up and Nels told about how he had learned NOT to pray for rain , but rather to pray for good crops. Nels said if you pray for rain only, you can get a deluge that you do not want at all. He said he thought it was wiser to pray for good crops.
That is what he had done for decades and he said the Lord never failed him in all his years of farming.
I replied to one of the e-mails I got with Nels’s advice…..pray for good crops; don’t pray for rain.
I do not know what the sender thought of it but I answered in that way.

I am very concerned about the dryness here and even more so about the downright drought farther south of us in the middle of the country. With the extreme dryness there, I think our usual source of warm damp winds out of the southeast are dried up by the hot dry air in the middle of the country, denying us our usual rains in the summer.
My parents often spoke of the awful dry summer of 1936 and I am wondering if we are seeing a repeat of the same weather patterns that existed then.

We did some serious digging in a part of our land that is pure clay and it is dry down more than 2 feet…no sign of moisture in that soil at all. Bad news for us…..as well as the states are so bad off from drought.