"Dead" Prayers

Many times when we get cardboard boxes in the mail, I'll tear off the tape and any stickers and I'll flatten out the boxes.  I will take the flattened out boxes to the garden and lay them down on the ground where they serve as a barrier to weeds growing up.  Over time, with sun and rain, they deteriorate and become part of the garden soil.

The other day when walking out to pick some fresh lettuce for a salad for supper, my eye caught something lying atop one of the cardboard boxes - a dead Praying Mantis.

A Dead Prayer

This Praying Mantis was huge and on his back and very dead.  I began wondering what happened to the old boy.  He didn't seem to have been killed by a predator. He was a fat dude, so he was in good health.  He was quite large. so maybe he died of old age.  Old age, in this case, would be 14 months as that is the top end of their lifespan according to what Google told me.

Seeing a dead Praying Mantis is not a normal sight and as I picked lettuce, my mind began to dwell on the dead praying mantis and think of what causes our (my) prayers to die - or to go unanswered.  Have you ever prayed for something for a very long time and it feels like your prayers have died?  I have. What causes prayers to die?  Or seem to die?  Good questions.

I went to THIS LINK as well as some others to find some answers in this non-exhaustive list:

1. Wrong Motives.  When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. James 4:3  Maybe our motives involve greed or selfishness, or revenge.  The Bible says God will not honor those prayers.

2. Timing.  Sometimes no answer may be a delayed answer.  God's timing is best.

3  Not God's will.  Maybe what we are praying for is not what's best for us.  God knows best.  In fact, Garth Brooks used to sing a song called, "Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers." We must trust Him and be patient.

4. Repetitive and Not heart-felt prayer.  And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. Matthew 6:7 Sometimes in prayer, my mind wanders.  Sometimes I will go on "auto-pilot" and merely say words similar to the way as school kids we'd recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  Our heart isn't in it and the Bible says God will not hear these prayers.

5. Unconfessed sin.  Behold, the LORD'S hand is not so short That it cannot save; Nor is His ear so dull That it cannot hear.  But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear. Isaiah 59:1  Maybe our prayers feel like they are dead because we need to get things right with God and/or our fellow man.

I don't want to end up like the dead praying mantis in the garden, nor do I want my prayers to end up like him.

Praying for the Crop

My work life and my home life couldn’t be more different.  I work in an office at a desk sitting behind a computer for five days a week from 7:30 to 4:30.  When I am home, I am seldom indoors, always outside unless it is dark or storming.  During my lunch breaks at work while I’m enjoying some leftovers, I search through the Internet for stories of interest that I might consume along with last night’s delicious meal.  Those stories are largely about gardening, homesteading, agrarian blogs and such. 

Although I’m by no means an art critic, nor do I have good taste in fine art, I do know what I like when I see it.  On this particular day I think I Googled “Agrarian Art” or “Old Agriculture Paintings” and came across some artwork by an author named Jean-Francois Millet that I liked.  I looked at a lot of his work and I like this one the best:

Image Credit

It is a very simple painting that depicts a couple in the midst of solemn prayer.  If you look closely, you can see that the gentleman has a digging fork and the lady has a basket.  There are potatoes in the basket as well as strewn around on the ground.  There is a wheel barrow loaded with what appears to be sacks of potatoes that they have already dug.

It is either early in the morning or late in the afternoon by the lighting and this tells you that this peasant couple is hardworking.  I think it is nice that they work side by side.  I would imagine that they talk to one another and share their thoughts all day.  Either they are laboring early or they have put in a long day in harvesting the potato crop.  If you look off in the distance, you can see a tall church steeple.  The steeple prominently shown in the background coupled with the couple’s reverence lets you know that faith was of foremost importance to this couple and this rural community.

I wanted to learn more about the background of the painter and the painting so I visited This Site and This Site.  Jean-Francois Millet was from France and was born in 1814.  If you look at his work, you will see that he painted many depictions of peasant agricultural life.  Many of his paintings feature simple farming folk bent over in work and capture the strong work ethic of a people tied to the land and its produce for their very survival.

The painting I posted above was originally named “Prayer for the Potato Crop.”  The art collector who commissioned the painting didn’t pick it up and Millet renamed the piece, “The Angelus.”  The Angelus refers to the ringing of the church bell at 6:00 am, noon, and 6:00 pm, calling Christian people to prayer.  The bell ringing is interesting to me, because my surname, Sonnier, is French and was the occupational name for a bell ringer (Late Latin sonarius, an agent derivative of sonare ‘to ring’) according to what I learned here.  It may have been an ancestor of mine that was up in the bell tower, overlooking the fields and ringing the bell, calling the couple to prayer – although I would have rather been in the fields!

I think it is important that the peasant couple humbled themselves and recognized that their success and survival was dependent upon the Almighty.  They toiled in a hardscrabble existence and performed manual labor that had been in effect since the Curse of the Ground in Genesis 3:17-18.  They were fervently praying for a bountiful harvest.  You can bet that they were doing the same when they planted the potatoes and worked the fields up until the harvest.  You can’t help but hope that their prayers were answered.

Millet’s painting is a good reminder that we would do well to answer ‘the bell’ and its call to prayer in our daily lives.

And A Cartridge in a Pear Tree

I can be a weird dude sometime, I'm not gonna lie.  When I get home from my office job, I visit with Tricia and Benjamin and then change into my 'work clothes' and start doing my afternoon chores and I have great fun doing them!  The chores can be classified into two categories:  routine things that must get done every day and items on my prioritized "knock-out" list.

Once I get that done, sometimes I'll just walk around and observe things.  In our fast-paced lives, we often overlook things if we don't make time to enjoy things - even mundane, unremarkable things. As I walked by the pear tree, I noticed one of the branches bending over due to weight of the ripening pears.  There were a couple of half-eaten pears laying on the ground beneath the tree.  I think the culprits were the numerous squirrels that inhabit our property.  Just to be silly, I hung a .12 gauge shell from the bending branch.

A cartridge in a pear tree

I began to think about This Post from last week about trying to grow some of your own food - vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, etc.  Birds and squirrels are two predators that you do need a firearm with which to protect your food, if you decide to grow it versus purchase it at the grocery store. Instead of having a partridge in a pear tree, you'd better be ready to have a cartridge in a pear tree or at least be ready to shoot one into your tree.  You can hang shiny objects like aluminum pie pans or rubber snakes or plastic owls to repel predators, but at some point, you'll need to go on the offensive to protect your crops.

The .12 gauge shell isn't the only thing of note hanging from the branch

But if you really want to protect your crops, you need to pull out the 'big guns' and by that, I mean what I was reminded of by the critter hanging on the bottom of one of the pears..  A Praying Mantis!

A praying mantis

If you really want a successful crop, you need to pray. Agrarian societies of old recognized the importance of humbling themselves before God and asking for His Blessings on their crops - and we should too!

A few pears for snacking on

I shook the pears to the ground and took them inside.  Pears will continue to ripen in the bowl in the kitchen.  Normally we'll cut up the pears and make a nice pear pie, but Russ ate a couple of them right out of the bowl and said they were crisp and delicious.

GOAT Knees

A popular saying with some young people these days is when something or someone is really good, they call it/them GOAT.  I had no idea what that meant until it someone explained to me that GOAT is the acronym for Greatest Of All Time.  So if anyone ever calls you GOAT, it is a good thing - be flattered, they are describing you as the greatest of all time!  If they call you an old goat, well, that's NOT a compliment.

We do have actual goats on the farm, though, two of them, both Nubian goats. Nubians have a heritage from the Middle East and Northern Africa, so they can withstand the hot climates of South Louisiana.  Nellie is our mama goat that we're currently milking and Annie is her little girl.  We'll probably get them bred again next month.  Goats are such interesting, quirky creatures with funny personalities.  Here's old Nellie, sitting by the gate.

Nellie the Nubian Goat

Nellie has quite a profile.  She has long ears and a long white beard.  You can see it hanging below her jaw. If you look closely in the photograph she has two three inch long waddles that hang from her neck.  No one knows what purpose they serve.  She is curious and has lately taken to jumping on top of the chicken coop, standing up on her hind legs and pulling down limbs of an oak tree to eat the new Spring leaf growth. The cows all use that opportunity to rush over and eat on the leaves while Nellie's holding the limb down.  The cows try to head-butt Nellie every chance they get.  They don't like her and I think the feeling is mutual.

Quite a profile

Nellie is very tame and is easily milked, providing us with goat milk with which we make kefir.  Goat kefir mixed with local honey and pureed fresh frozen fruit (figs, blueberries, peaches) is my breakfast on most mornings.

One other characteristic of Nellie is her knees.  Just look at them!  Not very pretty to look at.  They're rough, hardened and no hair grows on them due to Nellie staying on her knees a lot.  She'll kneel down on those knobby knees, push her head through the fence and eat weeds and grass growing on the other side. Over time, the friction of this process repeated time and again, has given her calloused, goat knees.

Calloused Goat Knees

When I observed this, I couldn't help but think about prayer.  Have you ever known someone who was a prayer warrior? People with great faith spend a lot of time on their knees in prayer, praising God for His Faithfulness, thanking Him for the blessings He bestows, interceding on behalf of others who are afflicted with illness or heartache, and pleading with God to answer their prayers.  Nellie is a goat and as far as I know, goats don't pray, but Nellie convicted me.  My knees aren't anything to look at, but they certainly aren't calloused like Nellie's.

Of course you don't have to kneel to pray.  You can pray in any position you wish. Looking at Nellie's Goat knees was a convicting reminder to me that my prayer life could use some improvement.

"God does nothing except in response to believing prayer." - John Wesley

GOAT knees

Wouldn't it be nice to be known as GOAT Prayer Warrior?  I need to be on my knees more, literally and figuratively.  Thanks for illustrating that perfectly, Nellie.