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Pastor’s Ponderings – Whistle While You Plow

Pastor's Ponderings

Dear Glen Mar friends,

When I was little, we’d go to my Papaw’s house in Southwestern Virginia for holidays, to be with my dad’s family. They come from a long line of Georgia red dirt poor farmers, and the stories that I hear about my forebears are a lot about the hardship they faced. It had to be difficult to have your livelihood dependent on Mother Nature—never enough rain, and then, just to be difficult, they’d have flooding. So many long days plowing behind a mule…subject to every season’s travails. My dad says he comes from a people with thin shoulders who never had much to speak of.

And yet…all the kinfolk my dad ever knew, and all the ones I knew, had a joyful spirit. They had this infectious, from the belly, laugh and could tell the funniest stories. I remember sitting up late and listening (a halo of cigarette smoke around the ceiling, probably) to some of the funniest stories I ever heard…about people kin to me and the way they made it through, and all the silly and unpredictable turns of events, and how somehow, God ended up making a way. Very often in spite of anything we tried to do, because what we tried ended up in a hilarious intractable mess! All of that to bring us to this place, to the turns of DNA that make me, and my children, and someday, my children’s children.

My dad reminded me of my humble lineage and all the hardships endured by all my thin-shouldered ancestors one spring when I called home full of anxiety about college exams. What if I failed? What if I couldn’t get the paper done? And Dad told me again about the mule and the plow….and he said, “Every ancestor of yours I ever knew, in spite of all that, whistled while he plowed. My girl, you are more than your ancestors ever dreamed of in offspring, and I know you are stressed…but can you whistle while you plow?”  Let those with ears to hear, hear.

Join us on Sunday when we will talk about joy and laughter in scripture, and how to have more joy and laughter in our life, and how God calls us to “whistle while we plow.”  (And what it all has to do with Jesus). As my daddy’s family would say, “Y’all come!”

See you In Church,

Pastor Mandy

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