Drive Close to the Cutter

It’s silage time where I live. Many of our Alberta farmers are spending their days doing the monotonous work of shredding damp crops into cow munchies. Frankly, I don’t feel like writing about the particulars of silage, so you can read about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silage
What I will say is that “the cutter” has a rotating bar that pulls in the swathed crop and shreds it into bite sized pieces that are then blown into a close-by grain truck.

I spent the other day keeping my friend company while he taught me what it takes to run the cutter and what it takes to drive the grain truck along side it. Since my friend is one of the most experienced operators on the farm, he typically runs the cutter, keeping track of the moisture levels and communicating with the truck drivers. You see, the truck drivers have to pull along side the cutter quite close in order to make sure that the full load of silage makes it into the truck beds. If you’re not watching and looking to the cutter operator you could end up hitting the very expensive piece of machinery, or missing the blowing silage entirely. My friend noted that if they are paying attention and communicating with him, they’ll eventually get the feel of when they need to speed up or slow down or turn to get the fullest load possible. If they get distracted while driving the truck or are on their cell phones they tend to lose sync with the cutter operator and this leads to lighter loads which leads to less profit in the long run.

Often the machine will pick up a discarded bit of metal in the field which leads to the work being halted while the cutter operator and truck driver look through for the metal jamming up the works. That day, a piece as small as the head of a bolt held up the operation for nearly an hour as five guys worked to remedy the problem.

The night before I rode with my friend I’d been thinking about the Bible verse James 4:8 which says “Draw close to God and He will draw close to you”. I was impressed by how well the silage operation worked as a metaphor for this verse.

Kind of like this, except with prettier equipment

If God is the cutter and we are the truck drivers then we need to be looking to God and communicating with him so we can draw close to Him and receive the full load of blessings. The more often we practice this, the easier it will become. If we’re distracted or not communicating with him we become too far away to receive His blessings.

Likewise, it doesn’t always take much to gum up God’s work in your life. Sometimes it can be quickly fixed between you and God and sometimes you need to take it to the shop and have more brethren help you fix the problem so you can get back to reaping the blessings.

I think back to the verse and find that for me it is true. When I make a conscious effort to draw close to God I usually can feel Him draw close to me and that is when I am most satisfied and thankful for my blessings. When I get caught up in the things of the world I get out of sync with what God is trying to do in my life and I become frustrated easily.

Just a small silage experience that I thought was neat.