If you listen to most of the modern-day scientific community, you’ll get the idea that the notion of God or Heaven is looked upon as a nice thing for the “un-informed” to believe in, but the well-educated know that it can’t be true because there really is no way to scientifically prove their existence. However, I would like to propose a different line of thinking.

Years ago, scientists of the day didn’t know what gravity was. They didn’t know about electricity. They thought the earth was flat. They thought it impossible for man to fly in the air or for a boat made of stone or steel to float on the water without sinking. They said it was impossible to get to (let alone walk on) the moon. They said that nothing would replace the horse as a mode of transportation. Etc., etc., etc.

When the Wright Brothers flew their home-made aircraft at Kitty Hawk, they could not, in their wildest dreams, conceive of the technology to build and fly a jumbo jet with 300 or more people on board and traveling at 500 or 600 miles an hour. And don’t forget the Concorde….New York to Paris in 3 or 4 hours ! We won’t even go into the concept of space travel, rockets, moon walks or drives in a special vehicle, travel to Mars and other planets, the Hubble telescope and a manned space-station where people can live for months at a time.

How about satellites that take very detailed pictures of the earth, computers, Internet, lasers, ultrasound imaging, radar, GPS, infrared photography, etc. And all of that comes after…electricity, telephone, phonograph and other major discoveries.

When my grandparents, Mim and Pip were youngsters (around 1900) everyone worked the farms, traveled and lived with horses as the only mode of transportation….and had no idea that things would ever be any different because for the last hundreds of years…that’s the way it had been.

On the farm, the first thing you did was cut the trees (by hand) and haul them away with the horses and then use the horses to get the stumps out too. Although, as a kid in the 50’s, I remember my granddad having a box of dynamite sticks, which was very common then and he and my dad would use them to blow the stumps out of the ground and then get rid of them.

After the stumps were out, you could plow the ground utilizing the horses and either a walking plow or maybe one on wheels and being pulled by a team of horses. This was a major job and they didn’t have the machinery or the technology to do it much differently. But they did use their ingenuity and resourcefulness.

For instance, I remember hearing the story of how grandfather Pipi, while clearing trees and stumps, came across a great big boulder. It was large enough that he couldn’t move it by conventional means so he came up with a different idea. He used the horses to pull other stumps, a lot of which were pine and loaded with pine pitch, up close to the boulder and then used some logs he had cut to build a tri-pod affair. At the top of the tri-pod, he used baling wire to tie the logs together and then mounted a large pulley through which he put a large rope. He would then hook one end of the rope to a stump and the other end to the horses and then by using leverage, he could pull the stumps up so they were next to or on top of the boulder. When he had a bunch of stumps in this pile, he took down the pulley and rope and proceeded to light the stumps on fire.

As the story goes, the fire burned extremely hot because of the pine pitch and the number of stumps and as the sun was going down, the boulder could be seen to be actually reddish colored by the heat. When Pipi could get close enough to the boulder, he had some milk cans filled with cold well water and he poured them on the rock. Sure enough, the cold water made the hot rock constrict so fast that it cracked and broke into smaller pieces. And in a couple of days, Pipi could use the horses to drag these smaller rocks out of the field and then go on to get the field ready to plant crops.

When I think about these stories and others, I’m reminded of how things were, years ago. It really hit home with me one day as I was working up a field next to the house where Mim and Pip had lived. It was one of the fields that had been a swamp and forest one time, then cleared and plowed and worked by horses.

The difference in machinery used to work that same field had changed so dramatically over the years. In Pipi’s time, a farmer with a good horse (or team of horses) could plow an acre of ground in a day…or approximately 8 to 10 hours. He had to have time to do his milking and other chores in the morning and again late in the day so he could only plow for so long.

Now, with modern machinery and equipment, farmers measure their plowing time by the number of acres they can plow in an hour. What once took 10 hours can now be done in 1 hour or even ½ of an hour depending on the size of the equipment. Farmers…..and scientists back in my grandfather’s day would never have believed such a thing could ever be done.

Another example is the sugar beet crop in our area. 80 to 100 years ago or so, farmers would plant 5 or maybe as much as 10 acres of sugar beets which when harvested could be made into white granular sugar. It was a crop that took a lot of hard work but the ground in the area was rich, it grew good beets and the crop, if and when it finally got up and growing, was a very hardy crop and could be counted on to produce a sellable commodity. The beet crop paid the mortgage on a lot of farms at that time.

The first step in producing a beet crop was to plow the ground in the fall so it could “mellow-out” throughout the winter months. In the spring, the farmer would harness up the team of horses, when the weather and the ground was fit and then use a harrow (spring-toothed drag) to work up the ground in preparation for the planting of the seed. That seed, by the way, was about the size of a sesame or mustard seed but it would grow into a beet that weighed somewhere between 4 and 10 pounds, depending on the summer rains, etc. and it was planted by a horse-drawn planter.

After the seeds had sprouted and were about 3 to 4 inches tall, they needed to be thinned out to a spacing of one plant every 6 to 10 inches apart depending on the farmer’s way of doing things. This job of thinning was usually done by the farmer using a hoe to chop out the unwanted plants. The farmer’s children had jobs too because sometimes they would actually crawl on their hands and knees and pull the unwanted beets out by hand. Up one row and down the next…from one side of the field to the other. Hour after hour. Day after day. And the mother helped a lot of time too but often as not, she would pick up the discarded beet plants and prepare them as a steamed food or added to a salad. Her other job was washing the familes’ clothes and mending the holes in the knees etc. from crawling around on the ground.

When the initial job of “thinning” was done, the family would then need to go through the field 3 or 4 more times with hoes to get the weeds out so the beets would be able to grow and mature through the summer months.

By the end of September, the beets were fully grown and it was time to harvest. This was another fun time for the family. A plow-like device, called a beet-lifter, was pulled by a team of horses and it ran in the ground right next to the roots of the sugar beet row and loosened up the soil and the beets. Then the family, or other workers, would come along and pick up the beets (one by one), knock them together to get the dirt off and then lay the beets in a long row.

The next job was to come along, pick up the individual beets and cut the tops off with a machete-like knife with a hook on the end. They would take a number of beets and lay them in a pile and then cover them with the pile with the leaves to keep them fresh. After this, they would come along with a wagon, pulled by horses, and stop at each pile of beets, remove the leaf covers and then using a heavy fork, they would throw the beets into the wagon. When the wagon was full, they would then start the trip to the “Sugar Factory” or sometimes to a railroad siding where rail cars were waiting to be filled.

Most of the time, the harvest would last through the month of October and into the early part of November. Very often, the farmers worked in mud or even frozen ground. For most of the farmers, the trip from the field to the unloading place or factory was somewhere between ½ mile to 5 or 6 or even 7 miles away. And when the weather was cold, a lot of the farmers would walk beside the wagon for part or most of the way just to stay warm. If the weather was good and everything went well, a farmer could make 1 to 3 trips per day depending on the distance needed to travel, hauling 1 ton or 2 tons per wagon load and could harvest an acre of sugar beets in 2 to 4 days.

Currently, farmers using modern equipment, sit in tractors with heated or air-conditioned cabs, using harvesters able to dig 6 or 8 or more rows of beets at one time and are able to fill 25 ton semi-trucks in about 15 minutes. In a day’s time, they are able to harvest 60 acres or even more. But, they still put in 15 to 18 hour days.

The reason I tell about all this is because, back in the days that grandfather Pipi was digging beets out of the frozen ground, one by one, with a pickaxe, there was no way he could have envisioned the technology changes that have led to the current ways of farming. Even scientists of his day would not have believed it. I started this portion by saying there may be a number of people who say that God or Heaven doesn’t exist because it can’t be proven scientifically. My idea is this. Maybe science can’t prove it today…but how about a year from now….or 5 years…or 10 years from now? We didn’t know about computers, or fingerprints…or DNA testing for a long time either.

The main point is…..what if the scientists are wrong, based only on what they know today? They’ve been wrong before. Wouldn’t it be a shame to miss out on all the rewards of a good life just because you had bad information to start? Who says God or Heaven doesn’t exist? NOT ME !!!!!

(keep for use) - Hebrews 11:6 (New International Version)

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.