A few weeks ago I wrote about our sweet potato project. We are experimenting this year growing sweet potatoes in grow bags. I enlisted the help of our children and this has been a nice project.
A couple of days ago I asked Jersey to water the sweet potatoes. Grow bags are nice, but they do dry out fairly quickly, so timely watering is a must. In her 10 short years Jersey has learned how to craft an argument at a level that's both impressive and frustrating. Only minutes after I made this request she informed me that the weather app is predicting a thunderstorm this evening. She felt like it would be best, and even more natural, to allow God to water the sweet potatoes Himself with the rain.
I felt like this was a "teachable moment". I told her that as a farmer we should control the things that we can control. There are plenty of things that we can't control, so we don't worry about those. But the uncontrollable factors make it even more important to control the things that we can. The sweet potatoes need water and we have the ability to give them water, so we should. And we did. And we missed that thunderstorm, not even a drop of rain.
There's a life lesson in there. Probably more than one. You can mine those out if you'd like. As for me I'll just continue to try to do my best at the things I can control, and waste no energy on the things that I can't.
