Steve Sjogren

The above are the words of my grandpa's Swedish brother who farmed wheat in central Kansas all his life.

Farming today has changed since Algot's prime-time years, but not entirely. No perfectionist ought to seriously ponder the vocation of farming. Murphy's Law of“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way” tends to be especially true in farming. When one lives on a thin margin, as in farming, where the difference between a season of profit or loss is in the minutiae, living in a ‘Ready for the challenge' attitude is imperative.

Globally, financial matters are not looking great at the moment. Janie and I recently sold a house that we had owned and greatly improved over a decade of living in. The house did not grow in value one bit – for all of our investments, we took a net loss of one-third of what we put into it. Yet we did this because it was time to move on to the next chapter of what Jesus is up to in our lives.

In the kingdom, this is the ongoing way things work. If we fixate on short-term apparent ‘losses' or ‘gains' we are looking with shallow eyes.

I wonder if part of the suffering of Jesus on the cross, when he felt the agony none will ever grasp, was to ponder his apparent ministry ineffectiveness the day of the crucifixion. A week earlier the throngs treated him like – like, well Jesus! That Friday his only remaining friends were a former prostitute, his mom, John the punk teenager of the Twelve, and maybe a few other women at most.

Here we are in the midst of a time when many are thinking and saying limiting words like never before. “No! We can't afford that” is being uttered over and over again by church leaders who are caught in the grasp of the fear of not enough. “We don't have that in the budget” is a common sentence these days. “We'd better hold off on that until we can afford it” is unfortunately the ‘wisdom' of the moment.

Respectfully, I could not disagree more.

Now is the time to become creative if finances are an issue. Now is the time to move out and fling our seeds hither and yon like no time before (Matt. 13). When times are tight (or seem to be tight) we call upon God's Spirit for his inspired, creative ways to convey the kindness of God to our generation. The best ways for conveying his kindness in your setting are yet to be discovered.

Without God's profound kindness moving through his people in simple, doable ways, there are countless faces around each of us who perhaps will not open their hearts to Jesus – to hear his invitation to become a part of his family!

We love, we serve, we are ready to give an account of the hope that lies within us. Boy oh boy are people open! The harvest is more ripe than ever folks.

There's no time like today! Ready or not, here we come!