Prayer as Listening

One of my earliest childhood heroes was George Washington Carver (thanks, Mom and Dad for having such a great series of books in our home).  I read his story over and over as I was growing up, and never tired of it.  Carver was born in 1864, just as the Civil War was ending, and plantations were being broken up into sharecropping estates. 

Because he was a frail child, not strong enough to work in the fields, he helped with household chores and gardening, so he developed an early love for plants.  He gathered and cared for a wide variety of plants and became known as the "plant doctor," helping neighbors restore ailing plants to health.  He loved art and music, and wanted to study piano, but one of his teachers at Simpson College, whose father was head of the Iowa State College Department of Horticulture, recognized his horticultural talents and convinced him to pursue a career in scientific agriculture.

[The fact that his art teacher came from this background and could connect Carver to agriculture in this way is amazing.  God guides his servants in mysterious but sure paths.] 

Carver was the first African American to enroll at the Iowa State College of Agriculture, today known as Iowa State University.  His excellence in botany and horticulture prompted his professors to encourage him in the pursuit of a graduate degree, where he became a leading plant breeder and developed scientific skills in plant pathology and mycology.  In 1896, he was invited to become a faculty member at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, where he gained an international reputation in research, teaching, and outreach to the community.  There, he taught his students that nature is the greatest teacher, and instilled in them the attitude of gentle listening to the forces of nature and the dynamics of agriculture.  He taught them that education should be used for the betterment of the people in the community.

Carver created what he called "movable schools," bringing practical agricultural knowledge to farmers, promoting health, sound nutrition, and self-sufficiency to Southern farming, which had subsisted on cotton up to that time.  Carver developed the peanut as a crop which could restore nitrogen and improve the soil so depleted by cotton crops for so many years.  His people could barely survive because of the thinness of the soil.  Carver wrote in The Need of Scientific Agriculture in the South: "The virgin fertility of our soils and the vast amount of unskilled labor have been more of a curse than a blessing to agriculture.  This exhaustive system for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our agriculture problem one requiring more brains than of the North, East, or West."

In the Book of Judges, we see again and again how God raised up leaders in Israel to lift His people out of crises, to establish them again and again in peace and safety.  What God did then, He still does today.  George Washington Carver was annointed by God to help his people--poor sharecroppers -- survive not as slaves but as free men.  Carver learned early in life to listen not only to 'nature,' but to God.  He was occasionally criticized by his peers in the scientific community for being too "intuitive," or "unscientific," as he freely admitted that his ideas often came to him in prayer.  Supposedly, at one time he prayed, "O God, show me the secrets of Your great universe."  Thereby God answered him: If I showed you the secrets of the universe, you could not comprehend them.  But I will show you the secrets of the peanut.

Carver developed 325 products from peanuts, making the peanut a valuable crop to farm.  He also developed more than 100 products from sweet potatoes and hundreds more from a dozen other plants native to the South -- all alternative crops to cotton that were beneficial to farmers and to the land.  As a botany teacher at Tuskeegee, his practice was to go out into the forest at 4:30 each morning to gather specimens for class that day.  It was during these early-morning forays, he said, that he received his instructions / inspirations for the day. 

His prayer was a 'listening' to God on a daily basis, and because he did not try to hide the Source of his wisdom, the scientific community sometimes ridiculed him,  but they could not deny his work. He died in 1943, was commenorated on postage stamps in 1947 and 1998, and a fifty-cent coin in 1951.  In 1977, he was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, among many other honors.

When God asked Abraham to leave his father's house and "come to a land I will show you," He made a promise to Abram, whose name meant "exalted father," though he had no children then.  God said, I will make your name great, and all nations shall bless themselves through you."  Later, Abram's name was changed from "exalted father" to "father of multitudes"-- Abraham. 

Those who learn to listen to God and to be guided by Him in all their ways are inheritors of the same promise:  Let me make your name great!  We might say that G.W.Carver, "son of slaves,' "poor black man in America following the Civil War," was transformed into "teacher, leader, shining light, deliverer of his people, Great American" -- by listening humbly to God, His Teacher, His Rabbi, His Source of Wisdom and Truth. 

Can we also learn to listen to God?