I mentioned that I did some plowing today which brings up an interesting subject.

Religion.

I tend to break things on Sundays, probably because I do more on Saturdays and Sundays than the rest of week. I had one of the tractors or something break down one Sunday a couple of years ago, friend of mine told me (tongue firmly planted in cheek) that it served me right for laboring on the Sabbath. Which brings me to the point of this drivel.

There's a fairly good-sized Baptist church down the road from me that my mother attends on occasion. Now this church is out in the country you could say. There's cows right across the road and 8 chicken houses within a mile of it. The preacher down there is one of these hellfire and brimstone types that I don't especially care for. Every summer he rants and raves about all the people around there mowing their yards and doing hay on Sundays. I know this because my mother said something about one day when she came in from church. He'd evidently preached a whole sermon about it. My mother is a devout Baptist, has been all her life, but he had her ticked off.

I can tell when she's put out with someone because she'll kindly wrinkle her nose a little bit when she talks. She said "he's got no business preaching about what he doesn't know anything about" I asked her "Why is that?" She said "He's never farmed, he lives in town, he never had to worry about losing a crop to the weather or having to get things down on the weekend because he'd worked all week." Needless to say, I found the whole exchange vastly amusing.

Here while back, I was talking to a younger fellow who was a preacher what he thought about it. He'd grown up on a farm and worked on a dairy farm for several years. He said "Well, I don't like to start anything on a Sunday, but I figure if the ox is in the ditch you need to get him out even if it is a Sunday." I thought that was an interesting way to look at it, so I said "Well, I've always got an ox in the ditch somewhere" He just grinned and "You gotta do what you gotta do."

Which reminds me of a good little tale told to me by a older gentleman who used to buy hay from me. Back in the thirties (I guess) when they first started giving weather reports on the radio, he and his father had a bunch of hay down with the weather service calling for rain Sunday evening. The hay was ready to get up, but he said his daddy wouldn't work on Sunday, he told his daddy he would try to get up what he could. His daddy said "suit yourself, I'm going to church." John went to the field and starting loading hay, just a little after noon he saw a couple of cars approaching. It was his father, the preacher and two deacons. John figured the preacher'd come out to raise sand at him for working instead of coming to church. He asked 'em what was going on and the preacher told him that waste was a sin too and they'd come to help get his hay in before it rained. John said that they did manage to gather all of it before it rained.

Now, I'd pay attention to a preacher like that. The other fellow, I've got no use for, whether he's a good preacher or not.