david and sheep

I saw no comments on your post today and though I am but a lowly farmer’s/rancher’s wife on the plains of Dakota land with no real education of importance, I felt lead to answer! Your post really “nailed” it!
I hammer all the time that we need to be in the Word more for therein lies our lamp and our guide as the Psalmist tells us.
Try starting a Bible study..  You hear it all, “Well,I just do not have the time” is the biggy excuse so is “will it be long?  I can not stay more than an hour!”

Luther would have some interesting words for our lowly farmers wife.

 

In the Concordia Journal for the spring of 2013 Prof. Robert Kolb wrote an article entitled “Called  to milk cows and govern Kingdoms”. He has a marvelous response for our lowly Farm-ranch wife.   He’s talking about our callings in life, our vocations, who we are and where God has placed us.  She is called to be a farm/ ranch wife, and she makes it very plain that she believes that Bible study is essential.
This is what Kolb says, “in university lectures and parish preaching Luther enlisted biblical figures as models for Christian living and talked about their harkening to God’s commands within the structures of their callings.  Luther imagined that Abraham could teach his students something about this subject and had the patriarch explain to the students how their trust in God’s love shapes their life in the world. He imagined Abraham saying that because God is “gracious, ready to forgive, and kind, I go out and turn my face from God to human beings, that is, I tend to my calling. If I am a king, I govern the state. If I am the head of the household, I direct the domestics; if I am a schoolmaster, I teach pupils, mold their habits and views toward godliness……In all of our works we serve God who wanted us to do such things and, so to speak, placed us in our walks of life here. Jacob’s household served as a model of Christian love exercised through the common, ordinaries of callings in daily life. Exercising his calling as son, Judah showed love and concern for his father in Genesis 43, as Luther looked back over the ages to read his mind. The professor did not shy away from speculation in constructing such exemplars of the exercise of callings , imagining that following the deaths of all four of Jacobs wives and “Jacob being deprived of the son he loved most, “his daughters-in-law and his daughter Dina “took the place of the mother of the household… These women were without doubt very upright matrons who would administer Jacobs household diligently and faithfully, and it prospered under their care. They were not indolent or lazy, for managing livestock demands thoroughness and care”.  Luther reveled in the ordinariness of God’s providential ways: why does the Holy Spirit mention “such trifling, childish, servile, feminine, worldly and fleshly things about these most holy man…? Why did he not write about things more serious and sublime? Why does he make so much out of the sweat of their working with the squalid matters of the household? Because, Luther observed, “God hides his saints under such masks and matters of the flesh so that they may seem more wretched than everything else.”  For the people who trust in God live out their callings in the midst of the troubles and afflictions of the world he created which has now fallen from its created goodness. That is where the promises and commands of God are active and deliver his presence.… in a sinful world callings are remedy for much, but precisely and suffering believers experience have a God who solve their chief problem by going to the cross contends with the burdens of daily life and blesses in spite of them by joining his human creatures together in exercising their mutual responsibilities.”

So our farm, ranch wife, out in the wilds of North Dakota is called to tend the cattle, rule the household, care for her husband, enthuse others about Bible study, pray for all people, witness to Christ in word and deed and give thanks to God for daily blessings. That is our life.