In this episode, Aaron pays tribute to his late cousin with the retelling of this popular speech.
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Story created & performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional vocals: Cori Birce
Art: Pete Whitehead
Original Music: thomas j. duke
Then God Made A Farmer.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe
Hey, everybody, it's Aaron. I'll try to keep this short. My extended family recently experienced a tragedy. My cousin, who was a Cleveland firefighter, was assisting the scene of a rollover crash on a highway in Cleveland when he was hit by a car that didn't stop and he later died from his injuries.
That individual, who I won't name, actually, as of this recording, was just indicted today for that hit and run incident that killed him. Regardless of whatever happens in that process, the fact remains that my cousin is gone, at least from the Earth, and his three daughters who are amazing they don't have their dad here with them, at least in the physical realm.
I was thinking about ways that I could honor him in the short term because I'm going to tell a story about this in the long term, but now is not the time. Now is the time for honoring and reflecting and grieving and that stuff, which I've been doing and will continue to do.
But I was trying to figure out what I could do in a small way on this show to honor him. I was going through the 7 MS archives, and I found one of our most popular stories, which was retelling of the famous Paul Harvey speech, so God made a farmer.
When I heard that speech and when you'll hear my retelling of it, the qualities that are elicited about this farmer, it just reminds me so much of my cousin, Johnny Tetrick. What a great human being he is. Enjoy this one and tell your loved ones you love them. If you have that hesitation with the text or it's old hat or I say it too much, just say it my advice because it matters.
Enjoy today's episode and listen for the rest of December, the next three episodes after this, we're going all holidays, all Christmas on 7 MS. You know how I get it. Nostologic. I'm all about it. If you're a holiday person, if you're a Christmas person, whatever, you just love the magic of this time of November and December, leading into the New Year.
Keep tuned in to 7 Minute Stories because the next three episodes are going to be all about that. I can't wait to share that with you. I'll talk to you soon.
It's been a really tough couple of weeks in America, and I am one of the lucky ones, and so are you if you're listening to this. I don't know about you, but I've been trying to figure out how to navigate this. How to find direction in a world that seems very turbulent and very unclear.
As a parent, how do you shield your kids and protect them and teach them at the same time? Every other word you hear is, I can't believe we live in this world. I can't believe it's come to this. Social media is a cesspool. The news cycle is a cesspool. I mean that in the sense that these are not places to really find reflection. These are not places to really have discourse and to communicate with people or to air your differences and comment threads.
It's just not the space. I've learned that the hard way. Years ago, I decided when it comes to real stuff, real reflection, I'm going to get out of the cloud and I'm going to get into life. I think about how our ancestors got through some of the most turbulent times, the most horrific times in human history. The thing that human beings have used for all of human history as an anchor to figure out a direction to overcome is story.
It's story. It's myth. It's fable. It's as simple and can be as simple as a nighttime story that you tell your child or an ASAP fable that you learn growing up. The reason why these things endure and that I know that they're so important is that they're not held hostage by the contemporary moment. They're not held hostage by a political persuasion or an issue or geography or a monarchy or a political system or an economic system.
They trip stories, myth, fables transcend all of that. That's why a person in Germany and Japan and America and South America at all different times on earth can hear one singular story and understand its moral truth, understand the meaning of it, get reflection from it, because it's the human language.
Even in times like this, for myself, I'm like, You know what? I got to dive back into story to figure out a direction to get through this tough time. That's where I get my sustence. The other day, I got in the car and I decided I was going to turn on the AM radio to see if any story, not news, but just something would pop up.
I put it on auto scan. And I took a drive 20 minutes south into rural America, into the countryside. It always brings me calm. The highway turned into a State road and the State road turned into a country road. The country road turned into dirt road. And I kept driving. I'm driving out into the fields now, and the wind is just orchestrating them. It's a summer's night. It's beautiful. The sky is burnt orange.
I open the windows and the wind comes in. I take a breath and I look out and the fireflies are starting to come up and communicate with each other with light. The rolling hills and the wind is orchestrating the trees. Out in the distance on one of these rolling hills, I see a farmhouse, a white farmhouse.
I pull up respectively close on the dirt road and I pull over, put my hazards on, and I just look and I see these two farmers out on tractors and one guy has two horses and he's plowing the field. It's like right in front of me. I'm watching these guys and I look out at the white farmhouse and I see some of their families sitting on the swing, swinging back and forth, watching them as they try to get work in before the day ends.
Just at that moment on the AM radio, a speech by the great Paul Harvey comes on called, So God Made a Farmer, right at that moment. I'm looking out at this scene and this speech comes up, and I'm going to recite it for you for the end of the 7 Minute Stories.
I'm not going to sound like Paul Harvey, but maybe this speech will speak to you in the way that it spoke to me, that if we want to bear fruit in this beautiful society of ours, we have to approach it with the grace, the humility, the strength and the compassion, and the hard work of a farmer.
On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker so God made a farmer. God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board. God made a farmer.
I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs and tame catancrius machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies, and then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon and mean it. God made a farmer.
God said, I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, Maybe next year. I need somebody who can shape an X handle from a permissive Sprout. Shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make a harness out of haywire, feed sacks, and shoe scraps, and who planting time in harvest season will finish his 40 hour week by Tuesday noon, then pain in from tractor back, put in another 72 hours. So God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in midfield and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer.
God said, I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink comb pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark.
It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and rake, and disk, and plow, and plant, and tie the fleece, and strain the milk, and replenish the self feeder, and finish a hard week's work with a five mile drive to church.
Somebody who'd bail a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, and who would laugh and then cry and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says he wants to spend his life doing what dad does. So God made a farmer.
7 Minute Stories is created and performed by Aaron Calafato. Our senior audio engineer is Ken Wendt. Our resident artist is Pete Whitehead. Original music by TJ Duke. If you or your company needs help starting a podcast, Aaron and Ken's company, Valley View, does just that. Reach out to them at valleyview. Fm. Special thanks to our partners at Evergreen Podcasts. I'm Cori Birce. Make sure to tune in next week for another story.
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