I am a farmer. So if you guys knew that about me already and probably many of you did not know that about me. Before I started working for Passion Life my family moved back from being long-term missionaries in Asia. We were there for 10 years. We moved back to North Carolina and we started a family farm. Mostly organic, beyond organic, and grass-fed meats. So we sell beef and pork and lamb and chicken and turkey and rabbit and eggs. Most of what we do is meat products. I don’t have a particularly green thumb. Actually I kill most of our houseplants pretty quickly. We don’t have a great survival rate. But I can grow a decent garden if it’s easy stuff to grow. The reason I say all this is because the Bible uses certain agricultural imagery all through it. And that is because the Hebrew people were an agricultural agrarian society. They were herdsmen. A lot of them owned flocks of sheep and things like that. But even from the oldest parts of the Old Testament, you know, pre Exodus from Israel, they were growing crops. They were raising animals. Most Hebrew people were in some way involved in farming. A lot of them were growing their own crops, whether it be for sale or for sustenance. And this is really common throughout the world in the part of Asia where we live. The people were herdsmen and they owned sheep and they owned yaks. But almost everybody had a family plot of land behind the house where they were trying to cooks out of the frozen ground some sort of winter vegetables that they could eat to supplement their diet. So even people who, like us, whose primary thing is hurting animals, if you will, being able to grow a little something. It’s something that pretty much everybody who live in the ancient world could relate to. And that’s probably why there are so many agrarian references within the Bible. The one that I was thinking of today as I came to do this video blog was really from James chapter 5 and starting in verse 7 where James is admonishing people to be very patient because suffering is coming. He uses an agrarian metaphor here. “Be patient therefore brothers until the coming of the Lord.” See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth being patient about it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also be patient. Establish your hearts for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Be patient. Oh, I’m not great at that. It’s not my finest thing to be patient. We do grow animals. If you will, we raise animals for meat products, but because we are a grass-fed, rotationally grazed, kind of one of these beyond organic type of farms, I do grow one crop. My crop is grass. I grow lots and lots of grass. I’m decent at it. I’m not great at it, but we are trying to increase soil health and and not use soil amendments and pesticides and herbicides and all the things that go into grasses to make it grow better because of course the animal is eating all that and if it’s its primary diet, source of diet, the animal is affected by all those amendments that you can put on grasses. We treat things really naturally. I am a grass farmer first and foremost, even though we don’t sell grass. And I know what it takes to be patient as a grass farmer who waits for the early and the spring rains. We are early in the late rains. We are just coming out of a long-term drought here in North Carolina. Most of North Carolina has been deeply affected by it over the last several months. If all you are doing is watching the grass grow in your front yard as the weather cools, you’re happy to have the grass slow down at this time of year because that means you don’t have to mow it so frequently. You’re not out there on Saturdays and Sundays and mowing your grass because the grass just isn’t growing at this time of year. However, the grass that is most common in North Carolina, both in my fields and in most people’s front yards is fescue. And fescue is a cool season grass. It grows really well actually at this time of year. This is the time of year that you want to have new fescue growing. This is the time of the year when you really should be getting that last rush of grass growing. But it has not happened because we had about 37 days of drought. In fact, those of you who live in North Carolina might even not realize this. And certainly most of you around the country, you know, we had this horrible flooding in Western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene that came in. I guess it was in September. We just had that terrible flooding that happened during that time. That was the last time it rained here in Winston Salem, North Carolina, which is about an hour and a half removed from some of the worst damage that North Carolina sustained. We had heavy winds and trees down and things like that lost power for a little bit, but it was nothing compared to the great suffering that many of our North Carolina neighbors went through. But that was the last time it rained here until today. It’s raining outside. It’s a beautifully dreary day. There is going to be a certain amount of mud. It’s been raining slowly and steadily for hours. I am so thankful. But in the last month, when my grass should have been growing, it has been stymied by drought. Now, in the summertime, when it’s 95 degrees outside, it turns brown in a drought. And we actually have to feed hay to our cows because it’s brown and dry and brittle in this kind of drought. It stays pretty green at this time of year because it’s cool outside. And even though there’s been no water, the grass has looked green, but it has not grown. And my cows have grazed everything down to the nub. In fact, I’ve probably hurt my grass by overgrazing it. Why am I bringing all this stuff up? I’m bringing it all up because of the metaphor of waiting patiently for rain, waiting patiently in due season for the rain to come so that the cycles can be fulfilled and the grass can grow in its time for our farm. And then you wait patiently, if you’re me, to see that young calf weaned from his mother and begin to eat that grass that really begins to grow so well in the month of March into April in North Carolina. And you wait patiently to see that animal grow. You wait patiently for that pig to put on weight until you finally arrive, not through feed supplements and hormone injections and all the things that happen at the grocery store, but you finally arrive at a full-sized, ready-for-slaughter animal. And it takes a long time. It takes a lot longer for me than it does for most farmers because I am feeding an all-natural diet on rotationally grazed pasture. Even our pigs are rotationally grazed to eat green things, salad, we say. And so it’s an appropriate metaphor. And a lot of the metaphors in the Bible that refer to patience around the agrarian society are, it would make sense to the average Hebrew person that the writers were writing to in that ancient world and that makes sense to me because I do a lot of waiting patiently for things to grow on our farm. We do a lot of waiting patiently the same way in passion life. A lot of what happens in passion life is very slow at the beginning. It does not grow by leaps and bounds. It often doesn’t grow measurably at all for quite some time. It incubates, it percolates, it waits for the early and the late rains metaphorically. We don’t despise small beginnings in passion life because as pro-life missionaries, most people don’t trust us right off the bat. They don’t want to hear a message about pro-life. Is this going to run people off of my, out of my church? Is this going to be a downtreading shame-based message for my people? They don’t know as they don’t trust us and sometimes we share our initial trainings with just a few people. It might be 10 people, might be a dozen. Sometimes we’re really happy to get 25 people at one of our first trainings. However, as the rain falls and Holy Spirit enables us to teach and people learn about the biblical basis of what we do at passion life and they understand that we are spirit-filled Christians and not an agenda-driven nonprofit just trying to make money or rack up numbers of people. They learn to trust us over time and we build this relationships and then the next time we come, let’s just take for example Ecuador was the first one of the places I went to for the first time this year. Next time we go to Ecuador, there are more people in our trainings because the local people now know us and they trust us and they’re willing to stick their neck out and advocate for people to come to our trainings and to say you really need to be a part of this. This is something that our churches in our communities needs to hear and so we go back and there are more people and then we go back and there are more people and we go back and we train people in how to do pregnancy crisis intervention and we train people on how to start aborting a staff so that they can open a pregnancy help center and we train people in various aspects of what it takes to rescue the innocent around the world but it is slow going sometimes. It is like the analogy of the farmer who has to wait very patiently for the good things of God to come into full bloom and we are appreciative of you, the Passion Life Fellowship, who stands with us and patiently prays with us and over the years patiently give on a regular and routine basis many of you are monthly donors. Some of you give other ways you give stock, some of you give annual lease, all those things are wonderful things some of you give one time that’s a wonderful thing but the meat and potatoes of any non-profit is this steady monthly givers that are willing to make sacrifices over the long haul so that we can budget for what we feel like God is asking us to do and is giving us the capability of doing every year. We thank you especially if you are a monthly donor and in particular if you’re a monthly donor not that you’re better than our other donors but today I specifically reach out and thanks to you as our monthly donors you help us to be patient and to know that in due time God will bring a harvest. Over time God is going to provide for the needs that we have in order to meet the goals that we have set by faith looking to him as our CEO, our boss and our CEO who tells us what to do. You as monthly donors help us to know exactly how to expect that that harvest is going to come even in times of drought even in times of leanness we can count on the long haul because of you. If you are not a monthly donor we’re thankful that you’re praying for us. We’re thankful that you give one time. We’re thankful that you give annually. Very thankful for all of those things. Consider what it means to a nonprofit to have monthly donors who give $2,500, $200 a month and we know that it’s coming and we can count on it and we can we can make plans according to that. It makes a big difference in a nonprofit organization. Thank you for your partnership in the gospel and as always it is our desire to work with you as the people of God to rescue the most vulnerable in the places that are hardest to reach with the gospel of life.