The Peanut Farmer Nobody Thought Worth Teaching

In 1885, a young Black man named George Washington Carver applied to Highland College in Kansas. He was accepted by mail, but when he arrived on campus and the administrators saw the color of his skin, they turned him away at the door. Can anything good come from the child of slaves?

For years, Carver wandered — farming, doing laundry, scraping by. Most people who met him saw only what they expected to see: a poor, uneducated Black man with dirt under his fingernails. But when Etta Budd, an art teacher at Simpson College in Iowa, watched him sketch plants with breathtaking precision, she saw something deeper. She recognized a brilliance he had not yet fully revealed to anyone. "You belong at Iowa State," she told him. "Go and see what you can become there."

Carver went. He flourished. He eventually revolutionized agriculture across the American South, developing over three hundred uses for the peanut and the sweet potato, lifting countless sharecroppers out of poverty.

Nathanael nearly missed his encounter with the Messiah because of a single dismissive question: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" He could not imagine that glory might arrive from an unremarkable place. Yet Jesus had already seen him — truly seen him — before they ever met. The One who knew him under the fig tree was the same One who had known George Washington Carver in every field, every rejection, every unseen moment of faithfulness. The Almighty does not judge by origin. He sees what is coming into bloom.