A FARMER'S CONFESSION OF FAITH

UNKNOWN

God and I raised fifty acres of corn. He created the soil, laid deep reservoirs of moisture beneath it, and by an alchemy all his own changed leaves and grass into plant food.

I plowed the land, harrowed it and buried grains of corn in the neat check rows.

Grains of corn! They could have been as pebbles had not God breathed the breath of life into each grain.

I cultivated the ground as God worked by my side. If he had not done his work well, I should have failed. If I had not done my work well, he would have failed.

With my two horses I drove up and down the long rows. God used 121,000 horses in the field -- 2,420 h.p. units of divine energy per acre every moment that the sun shone.

Throughout the long summer, he watered the growing crop, not like the meager dripping of a garden hose; he distributed 165,000 tons of water over the fifty acres of earth.

He fed the corn from his abundant store of carbon dioxide, little green chlorophyll bodies in the blades sized the hot rays of the sun and sifted out the energy the plants needed to digest nitrogen as they sucked it up from God's pantry underground.

I worked 500 hours on our fifty acres.

God worked more than six hours to my one -- twenty-four hours a day all summer without pausing a minute.

Even after I had finished my work, laid the corn by and left the field, he stayed on. He still had to put rich pollen in the yellow tassels, and send his breezes to scatter it over the silky stamens that curled from four million green husks.

In this he worked alone. He was performing a miracle beyound the skill of any human hand or the understanding of the most scientific mind. Without a miracle I should have had no corn for my labor.

Each grain I planted in May became four thousand grains in September.

God packed each grain with potential bone and sinew for my family and cattle.

He endowed each grain with the germ of life so skillfully wrought, so delicately specialized, so exact in every ingredient that it could reproduce itself in corn and nothing but corn.

The corn we raised is His and mine, for we are fellow workers.