The Plant Doctor of Diamond, Missouri

In the 1870s, a frail orphaned boy named George Washington Carver wandered the woods near Diamond, Missouri, cradling wilted plants in his small hands. Neighbors noticed something remarkable — whatever George touched seemed to revive. They called him "the plant doctor," though he was barely old enough to reach the kitchen table.

George felt pulled into creation's mysteries the way a river pulls toward the sea — persistent, wordless, irresistible. He didn't call it a divine summons. He called it curiosity. For years he drifted from town to town, absorbing knowledge wherever he could find it, always sensing that the natural world was trying to tell him something he couldn't quite name.

It was Professor James Wilson at Iowa State who finally played the role of Eli. Wilson watched George's extraordinary gift and spoke plainly: "God has given you a special talent. You must use it for your people." The nameless pull suddenly had a name, a direction, and a purpose.

Carver spent the next fifty years at Tuskegee, coaxing three hundred products from the humble peanut, listening each morning in his laboratory at 4 a.m. — a habit he never abandoned. "I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station," he once said, "through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in."

Young Samuel heard a voice three times before Eli helped him recognize who was speaking. Sometimes the call of the Almighty comes long before we have language for it. The question is never whether God is speaking — only whether we have learned to say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."