The Farmer Who Planted in Drought

In 1988, the worst drought in fifty years scorched the plains of central Kansas. Creek beds turned to cracked mud. Cattle stood listless under cloudless skies. Most farmers in Ellis County refused to plant winter wheat that September — why waste the seed?

But Leonard Theis drove his grain drill across 400 acres of dust anyway. His neighbors thought he had lost his mind. "You're burying money in a graveyard," one told him at the co-op. Leonard just shrugged and said, "The ground has always come back. I plant because that's what faithful farmers do."

October passed dry. November, the same. His fields looked like a parking lot. Then in late December, a series of slow, soaking rains rolled across the Smoky Hills. By March, Leonard's wheat was six inches tall and emerald green — the only crop for miles. His neighbors, the ones who had held their seed back waiting for certainty, had nothing to harvest come June.

Habakkuk lived in his own kind of drought — a spiritual one, where Babylonian violence was swallowing everything in sight and God seemed silent. Yet the Lord gave him this anchor: "The righteous shall live by his faith." Not by sight. Not by favorable conditions. Not by waiting until the outcome is guaranteed. The righteous plant in the dust and trust that the God who commands the rain has not forgotten His fields.

Leonard Theis didn't need to see the clouds forming. He just needed to trust the soil and the One who made it.