Let’s ask for the Lord’s help as we come before His Word. Father, help us to listen, open our ears. These are familiar words to many of us, but we don’t want our time to be an exercise in mere religious activity. Teach us, rebuke us, change us, inspire us, encourage us, lead us to Christ. We pray in His name. Amen.

The first church I served, hard to believe almost 20 years ago now, was in Orange City, Iowa. I was the associate pastor and it was a great place to start out in ministry. I learned a lot about the basics of ministry, had opportunities to preach and teach and did a lot of visitation and weddings, funerals, elder meetings, staff meetings. You probably heard me say before it was a big church in a small town, about a thousand people, and the town was a little over 5000 people, so 20% of the town was in your church and there were a dozen other Protestant churches.

It was mainly in a rural part of the country. The Dutch buckle of the Dutch Bible belt, Orange City. Not so named because there were any orange trees, but named after William of Orange.

Our church had doctors and lawyers, bank owners. It had many more professionals than you might think. But more than any other church I’ve been a part of, it had, not surprisingly, lots of farmers. Generations of farmers. Mostly growing corn and soybeans, a few pigs here and there, and one very large dairy farm that moved into town to have three thousand cows come from California to northwest Iowa to provide milk for Blue Bunny. They just backed up their trucks and hauled away milk every day.

I grew up with farmers on both sides of my extended family, so I knew a little something , but not much, and I admit I wasn’t the grandchild who was always pining away to get to the farm. I look back now and realize, oh, I was allergic to everything on the farm, that was part of it. I’m very much a child of the suburbs.

So when I moved to Sioux County, Iowa I had to learn new things. Learn about planting and harvesting and seeds and combines and ask how much was a bushel of corn selling for these days. Everyone, it seemed, knew about a lot of stuff and knew how to do stuff that I didn’t know. Just growing up in that sort of environment and hands on and even if you weren’t a farmer, someone in your family probably was. It seemed like everyone knew how to shingle a roof, finish a basement, change the oil in your car; a bunch of things I still don’t know how to do.

Some guys one weekend wanted to surprise my wife when she was out of town and they were finishing our basement and I “helped them” by handing them “is this a hammer?” and trying to do something in the corner that ended up looking very embarrassing.

They always knew directions, they knew north, south, east, and west. They would give directions, how to get places based on not only who lived in that house, but people who used to live in that house, which was very hard, if you were new. They liked to talk about the weather. Not just as small talk, but because the weather mattered; was this year’s harvest going to be good or bad or great or awful?

And because that corner of northwest Iowa is blessed some of the best farmland in the world, really, and because the worst weather seemed to dump on South Dakota and Nebraska and jump over Sioux County, they often had very good harvests.

One of the things I will always remember about my time there is an annual prayer service they had. It was called the prayer service for crops and industry, that’s exactly what it was called. Every year at the beginning of planting season the church held a prayer service, pray for the seed to be sown and for good weather and for the harvest that, Lord willing, would come six months from now. And I gathered that the prayer service had been around for a long time.

And when I got there,