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Plowing Around a Rock

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 21, 1906

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 83, No. 25.

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Plowing Around a Rock

“I HAD plowed around a rock in one of my fields for five years,” said a farmer to a writer in The Advance, “and I had broken a mowing-machine knife against it, besides losing the use of the ground in which it lay, because I supposed it was such a large rock that it would take too much time and labor to remove it. But to-day, when I began to plow for corn, I thought that by and by I might break my cultivator against that rock; so I took a crowbar, intending to poke around it, and find out its size once for all. And it was one of the surprises of my life to find that it was little more than two feet long. It was standing on its edge, and was so light that I could lift it into the wagon without help.”
“The first time you really faced your trouble you conquered it,” I replied aloud, but continued to enlarge upon the subject all to myself, for I do believe that before we pray, or better, while we pray, we should look our troubles square in the face.
“Imagine the farmer plowing around that rock for five years, praying all the while, ‘O Lord, remove that rock!’ when he didn’t know whether it was a big rock or a little flat stone!”
“We shiver and shake and shrink, and sometimes do not dare to pray about a trouble because it makes it seem so real, not even knowing what we wish the Lord to do about it, when if we would face the trouble and call it by its name, one half of its terror would be gone.”
“The trouble that lies down with us at night, and confronts us on first waking in the morning, is not the trouble that we have faced, but the trouble whose proportions we do not know.”
“Let us not allow our unmapped trouble to make barren the years of our lives; but may we face it, and with God’s help work out our own salvation through it.”
Many a Christian has been plowing around a duty, a cross, a bad habit, and we know not what, for more than five years, afraid to touch or examine it, and it stands in the way to-day as it did at first. Rout it out, man! it is an easy job when you once take hold of it.—Selected.