George Washington Carver and the Peanut's Confession

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri, around 1864. Kidnapped as an infant along with his mother, he was ransomed back for a racehorse. Orphaned, sickly, and Black in a nation that had barely finished tearing itself apart, Carver had every reason to see himself as forgotten.

Yet decades later, standing in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute, Carver held up a common peanut and said he had asked God, "Mr. Creator, why did You make the peanut?" He claimed God replied, "I have given you enough brains to figure it out." From that humble legume, Carver developed over three hundred useful products — dyes, plastics, fuel, medicines — transforming the agricultural economy of the American South.

What made Carver remarkable was not just his genius but his memory. He never forgot where he had come from. He refused to patent most of his discoveries, insisting they belonged to the One who had given them. "It is not we who do the work," he once told an interviewer. "It is the Almighty working through us."

This is precisely the heart of Deuteronomy 26. When the Israelites brought their firstfruits to the altar, they were commanded to recite their story — "A wandering Aramean was my father" — before offering anything. God wanted them to remember the slavery, the cry for deliverance, the wilderness. Because only those who remember where they have been can truly give thanks for where they are. The basket of grain was never really about the grain. It was a confession: everything I have came from Your hand.