George Washington Carver's Morning Prayer

Each day before dawn at Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver walked into the Alabama woods to pray. The formerly enslaved scientist, who could have pursued wealth at any prominent university, had committed his life's work to helping struggling Southern farmers survive. "Mr. Creator," he would whisper among the pine trees, "show me the secrets of Your universe."

In 1914, the boll weevil devastated cotton crops across the South, threatening to destroy an already fragile economy. Carver had spent years urging farmers to rotate their fields with peanuts and sweet potatoes to restore nitrogen-depleted soil. Now, with cotton ruined, those who had listened found their peanut harvests thriving — but no market existed for them.

So Carver returned to his laboratory, committed the problem to the Almighty, and got to work. Over the following years, he developed over three hundred products from peanuts — milk, flour, dyes, plastics, gasoline — transforming the peanut from a humble legume into an economic lifeline for an entire region.

When Congress invited him to testify in 1921, a senator asked the source of his remarkable knowledge. Carver answered simply: "From an old book." When pressed which book, he replied, "The Bible."

Carver never patented most of his discoveries. He had committed his works to the Lord, and God established not just his thoughts but the livelihoods of thousands. That is the promise of Proverbs 16:3 — when we surrender our plans to God, He shapes them into something far greater than we imagined.