The Plant Doctor Who Needed Someone to Name the Voice

In Diamond, Missouri, around 1874, a frail orphan boy named George Washington Carver wandered the woods behind the Carver farm, whispering to sickly plants. Neighbors brought him their wilting roses and ailing fruit trees, calling him "the plant doctor," though he was barely ten years old. Something kept pulling him toward the soil, the roots, the hidden architecture of growing things — a persistent nudge he could not explain.

When George left home to find a school that would admit a Black child, he boarded with Mariah Watkins in Neosho. She watched him press wildflowers between book pages and spend hours studying the veins of a single leaf. One evening she placed a Bible in his hands and said, "You must learn all you can, then go back out in the world and give your learning back to the people."

That sentence changed everything. Mariah did not give George his gift — God had been calling him through every bloom and broken stem since childhood. But she was the one who named it. She helped him understand that the voice tugging at him through creation was the voice of the Almighty, and that it carried a purpose.

Young Samuel heard his name called three times in the darkness of the tabernacle and did not recognize who was speaking. It took old Eli to say, "It is the Lord." Sometimes the call of God comes long before we have the language for it, and we need someone further along the road to help us answer, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."