Published: May 12, 2009 11:23 pm      

John Cannon: Father knows best: 5/13/09

This is the story about a willful act of disobedience that occurred more than 40 years ago. Since it mostly involved my father and me, I am fairly certain I am the only one still living who remembers it.

I am fairly certain that if Dad remembered the incident at all, he simply thought of it as one of the many stupid things his only son did as a teenager on the farm. But to me, this one particular incident — in which I was certain my father really didn’t know best — had a profound impact on me. And while there is nothing even remotely religious about it, it continues to affect my relationship with my heavenly father.

I’ve shared versions of this story before in this column, but I think it is worth repeating.

It was near the middle of May and it had been an extremely wet spring, much like the spring of 2009. With day after day of rain, we had been unable to get into the fields to prepare them for planting. We were at least one or two weeks behind in planting our corn, the No. 1 cash crop on the Cannon farm.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning, and it had not rained for a day or two. Dad put me on the big John Deere 4010 and instructed me to disk a field, the final step before planting. In the middle of the field, a wet spot was visible. Dad told me to work around the wet ground and in a day or two we could come back to finish the job.

“Don’t try to disk it,” he said. “You will just get stuck.”

For the next few hours, I did as Dad said. However, as I prepared to go to another field, I took another look at the wet spot. It looked a lot dryer than it had just a few hours earlier.

To move the disk to another field was a lot of work involving heavy lifting. I had to fold two segments of the disk on top of the rest of the disk in order to get through the gate. In addition, I had to lift the disk onto its wheels to prevent it from dragging on the road.

Like I said, this was a lot of work, and as I got down off the tractor to do it, I knew I would have to do it again when I returned to the field to finish the disking.

That’s when I decided the son knew better than the father. I decided that I could finish the job now. I drove to the wet spot and started to run the disk through it.

And I got stuck. Really stuck. In an effort to get out of the muck, I rocked the disk — and buried it. Finally, I unhooked the disk from the tractor, drove the tractor to dry ground and used a long chain to pull the disk from the mud. Unfortunately, there was a rather substantial hole where the disk had been buried, and it didn’t take Dad long to figure out what had happened.

He didn’t punish me. He just made me repair the damage I had done. That was enough.

So what does this have to do with my heavenly father? Not much, really, except that there have been many times in my life when I have disobeyed my heavenly father because I thought I had a better plan than he did. Imagine that: To think that I know better than God. How arrogant can one get? Yet there are times when we all act that way.

When I have disobeyed my heavenly father I have usually gotten just as stuck in the mud as that day when I disobeyed my earthly father. And just as I did that day, I have tried to dig myself out of the mess I created.

Meanwhile, my heavenly father has been just as forgiving as my earthly father was that day. I suppose he knows that we learn from our mistakes, which, of course, doesn’t prevent us from making other mistakes.

I remember looking back and just barely seeing the top of the disk stuck in the mud that day. And sometimes I have been just a stuck as that disk all because I disobeyed my heavenly father.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2649.