The Irrigation Ditch on Kemper Road

In 1983, a tobacco farmer named Earl Sutton outside Danville, Virginia, faced the driest August anyone could remember. His wells were low. His neighbors had stopped watering their fields entirely, hoarding every drop for their households. Earl had a small irrigation ditch fed by a creek on his property, and he made a decision that baffled everyone on Kemper Road — he opened the ditch to his neighbors' fields before his own.

His wife, Dorothy, called it foolishness. His brother called it worse. But Earl had sat in the pew at Mt. Hermon Baptist that Sunday morning and heard Malachi 3:10 read aloud, and something seized him. "Test me in this," the Lord Almighty said. Earl figured if the God of heaven was willing to put His own reputation on the line with an invitation like that, the least he could do was take Him up on it.

Three days later, the rains came — not a drizzle, but a soaking, ground-swelling downpour that filled the creek past its banks. Earl's crop came in full that October. But he would tell you the harvest was not the point. The point was what happened inside him when he opened that ditch — the fist in his chest unclenched, and he discovered that the God who said "prove me now" was not asking for his water. He was offering to flood every dry place Earl had been too afraid to name.

Malachi's challenge still stands: the Lord Almighty does not ask us to give blindly. He asks us to test His faithfulness — and find it inexhaustible.