Dear friends,
The month of June has arrived, the month of weddings. Love is in the air as is cotton from the cottonwood trees, not to mention all kinds of pollen.
We continue to be in the rainy season. Some folks have had much more rain than is needed, yet others can’t buy a passing shower. Agricultural people don’t really need more stress, and we need to pray for them.
After all, the Lord is the one who provides the sun and rain. We can only ask for those things to be provided and rest in the knowledge that he will answer those prayers in His good timing.
I have shared in the past that I used to stress over the weather during the haying season. If there was a forecast of rain, I wouldn’t mow and when I expected dry weather and mowed the grass down it would surely rain. While doing my daily Bible reading one day, I read a passage of scripture that changed my whole outlook. I’ll share it with you here.
“If clouds are full of water, they pour rain upon the earth. Whether a tree falls to the south or the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie.
Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.
As you do not know the path of the wind, or how a body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things” (Ecclesiastes 11:3-5).
After reading and absorbing the truth of this passage, I stopped looking at the clouds and experienced a lot less stress. Another stress reliever was Psalm 50. There was a point during an agricultural recession several years back, when our cows were sold by the bank. I thought those were my cows that I had worked to acquire. Suddenly I learned differently.
The Lord spoke to me through His word again: “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it” (Psalm 50:9-12).
Simply His,
Pastor Jerry
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