The Pastor’s Piece – May 15, 2022
The Pastor’s Piece
FCFI
May 15, 2022
A day in the life of …
With the advent of the Internet and the smartphone and everything in between, I enjoy going online and watching farmers at work in different parts of our country. These farmers take a camera with them everywhere they go and record their days’ activities. Simple things like hauling corn to the elevator, sorting cows, pumping the manure pit, or working a field becomes entertainment. It’s basically all the same work, just different. I don’t really have a desire to carry a camera with me everywhere I go recording, editing, and posting my day’s activities, but I don’t mind giving you a glimpse into my day by writing it down on paper. So here is a glimpse into a typical day in my life.
First thing when I get up in the morning – I sit down at my desk and begin to formally put my sermon together for Sunday. Sunday will be here before I know it. After an hour or two or more of studying, my phone dings. It’s my wife who is upstairs. Someone just texted her. We have cattle out along the road. Getting them in takes precedence over everything. I jump on the four-wheeler but the battery’s dead and it won’t start. The other four-wheeler has bad gas in it from last winter which I haven’t gotten around to messing with. I know it won’t start, but I try it anyway without success. The neighbor borrowed my farm truck yesterday because his is in the shop. That means I am now going to have to hoof it. Hopefully the heifers won’t give me the runaround. I call my nephew for backup. He arrives and between my wife, me, and him, they go in without incident. I find the hole in the fence where they got out and patch it up. There’s always one leader in the herd that gets out and leads at least one friend astray. I like her tenacity, but I wish she would apply it in a more positive way.
We planted some trees a couple weeks ago and now that it has stopped raining they need water. Trouble is they are out in a remote area so I have to haul water to them. The guy at the nursery said they need 15 gallons each, three times a week. It just so happens my brother has a mountain of discarded 15 gallon plastic drums. I get six of them – one for each tree, and thoroughly flush them out to get rid of any detergent residue that might be lingering in them. Then I fill them up and water the trees. I enjoy that job knowing how refreshing it must be for the trees to have that life-giving water. The next day, I noticed three of the trees had fully leafed out.
Next is getting an electric wire strung around another pasture fence to keep the Angus cattle in. My son has three Black Angus heifers that we keep at our place. One of them had a baby in April so the fence has to be fairly secure in order to keep that little guy from running through the holes or under the wire. After a couple hours, the fence is secure and the cattle are let out.
About that time, I receive a phone call from our Tuesday Bible study Pastor informing me he is under the weather and will be out of service for a day or two. That means I either cancel our Tuesday study, or take it myself. I choose to take it myself because every time I cancel anything, I forget to let someone know and they end up driving several miles to church, only to find no one there. I hate it when that happens. So I spend some time at my desk preparing a study for our Bible class.
Later in the week we have a Board meeting scheduled at church. I gather all my documents and reports and set them in a neat stack on the counter next to the door, assuring that I won’t forget to take them to the meeting. Of course that doesn’t assure anything, because more times than not I walk right past and forget them anyway, then have to turn around and come back.
With the weather finally warming up, it’s time to get the garden in. I track down my rototiller which is used by several other family members, and get it home. The garden tills up like, well, a garden. There’s not a clump of dirt to be found. My wife makes a master plan, marks out the rows and plants the seeds. The tomatoes will wait a couple days until it cools off a little. Planting them in 90 degree heat and sunshine will wilt them.
In the meantime, my nephew drops off a tractor and manure spreader and asks me if I’ll have time to haul out a “couple loads” so they can plant the field across the road. (It’s their heifers in my shed). I can work it in, but it will be over a couple of days. Since this will be the last cleanup of the spring, I decide to clean the heifer shed out too. The skid loader needs hydraulic fluid, which means I will need to run into town and get some. It ends up being 5 loads worked in over three days, but everything is clean for now and that feels good.
Tomorrow and the rest of the week, I will mostly focus on my church duties which includes sermon and Bible study prep, along with visiting people, answering phone calls, emails, and texts. It’s a great life and one I enjoy. God is good.
Well, that’s your video for this week. Hope all is well in your world.
“God rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done,” (Genesis 2:2).
(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin)