I spent many years of my life trying to work out a system by which I could "plan my day," and work efficiently on point to get done all the things I had on my "list." It has been a tough goal to accomplish. I still make lists, but I haven't very often been able to successfully follow through on my "plan for the day." I might succeed with part of the plan, but I can't recall ever successfully following the plan step by step throughout a day.
I was a farm boy during my growing up. I later became a mechanic, or as we say today, an automotive service tech! Then for most of my adult life I have been a minister and pastor. I always tried as a pastor to keep certain regular hours, hours in the office, hours for study, hours at hospital visits and other pastoral calls, hours for administrative tasks, hours for regular exercise and rest. It hardly ever worked out just as planned. I could say the same thing about life on the farm, or life as a vehicle repairman. Life is just hard to systematize. Things come up. The phone rings and the whole plan for the day changes. You go to meet an appointment and the doctor has been called away on an emergency. You jump in the car to go shopping and the car won't start. The day gets peppered with unexpecteds. Sometimes it seems that life just won't cooperate with one's well-laid plans.
Even the Bible has an interesting acknowledgement that we don't always get to plan out every detail for our days or weeks, or years. I'm thinking of a statement in James 4:13-15: "Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain." The point is made that you never know exactly what tomorrow will bring. "Instead, you ought to say, If the Lord wills we will live and we shall do this or that."
Whether we operate a farm, keep livestock, repair automobiles, run a store or lead ministry in a church, it seems necessary always to be open to and to expect the unexpected. When I was a boy growing up, the main radio station we relied on was KWTO, "Keep Watching the Ozarks," Springfield, Mo. One of our KWTO Radio personalities in the 1940s was May Kennedy McCord. Mrs. McCord was kind of a homespun philosopher and commentator on life with all its ups and downs and vicissitudes. She would always sign off her program by saying, "See you next week, the good Lord willin', and the creek don't rise!" In our day of nice paved roads and fine bridges, that comment about the creek risin' may sound a bit strange. But some of us grew up in Northwest Arkansas when our roads were mostly gravel and dirt and mud, and many bridges were what we called low-water bridges. A low-water bridge was a concrete crossing pad with creek water running over it. When the water was low, it was a bridge. When the water was high, you didn't cross. So, "if the creek don't rise" was a way of saying that our well-laid plans might not work out just so.
Probably, in farming, we see the most constantly occurring and most difficult to predict unexpecteds. The farmer may refer to the almanac to try to predict the seasons and to help decide when to plant and so on. Or he may have no use for the almanac, and have his own way of predicting, like watching the woolly worms or checking the shape of the persimmon seeds. Planning is great, planning is necessary, but every plan is not going to work out as planned. Heavy rains fall in Pea Ridge, and Otter Creek rises, and even though the old low-water bridge on State Line Road has been replaced by massive "tin whistles" embedded in concrete, the whistles often plug with debris and the water flows over anyway, sometimes a hundred yards wide. We worry and fret because of the rain.
Then later in the season it doesn't rain, and we worry and fret over the drought. Normally, in February we expect snow and ice and freezing weather. Then we have a year like this year, in which we see 70 degree days in February. OK, we're planning to work in the hay today. Uh-oh, the tractor has a flat tire, and our fuel supply is running low. The neighbor calls, "Russell, some of your cows have broken through the fence and are over here on my place!" Some days just don't get the idea that we are trying to make things run efficiently and smoothly. OK, it's time for the evening milking. We get the cows in and get started, and the electricity goes off. Well, it's great that we have that generator that the tractor can run, but the tractor is still in the field and hooked up to the hay rake. "Jerry, go get the tractor and let's get it hooked to the generator!" Some days, smooth is just not the way it goes.
We may grouse and complain about our unexpecteds, our inconveniences, our unwelcome surprises, our unanticipated complications, but we learn to see them as part of the challenge of life. We learn to expect some unexpecteds, and to anticipate that in all our expecting we need some adaptibility and flexibility. We don't always have full control over everything that we encounter. But we keep hoping, and we keep on keeping on.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. The opinions expressed are those of the author. He can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 03/01/2017