Thursday, June 19, 2025
Juneteenth, Holiday in the USA
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Finger
Brothers and sisters, if only you would put up with a little foolishness from me!
One morning Dad finished milking the cows and started the tractor’s power takeoff to grind some feed. He poured ears of corn from the crib into a deadly machine that ground everything into little feed-sized pieces. A few minutes after he got started, a crusty chain reached out and cut off his right index finger. There was blood everywhere.
I was the oldest child. Not old enough to drive but old enough to look for a lost index finger in the dust of the now quiet corn crib. Dad shut off the tractor before he came in the house. The crib whispered to me. The cows had been milked and so they were quiet too. The car was gone, and Mary Kay and John were in the house. Cleaning up the blood on the kitchen sink? I don’t know.
I did find the finger. Truly. It was covered with the dust of ground corn and still warm. (I don’t actually know if it was still warm.) In a moment of first-born responsibility I ran into the kitchen, got on the telephone and called the hospital. Thankfully, no one was already using the party line, or I would have had to break in and announce our emergency. Fifteen minutes later a nurse had drive out and drove back in to the emergency room with what had been Dad’s finger, where they wiped off the corn dust and dried blood and sewed it back on as best they could.
The works of his hands are faithful and just, reliable forever, shaped in truth and equity.
We all prayed. Pastor Neitzel came out to see Dad and prayed with us. Dad’s hand was wrapped tight for a couple of weeks. His brother Merlie came over and helped milk the cows, helped to grind their feed. Merlie kept his fingers crossed and very well protected. They didn’t have another brother to stand up and help if anything happened to him.
In due course, Dr. Hamm unwrapped Dad’s hand, hoping for the best. But the suture didn’t take. The finger must have been just too far gone, dried up … dead, I guess you’d say. I had felt like a hero, now I felt like a heel. Of course nobody let me stay there for long. I’d done what I could, which turned out not be enough.
Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Dad learned not just to grind feed with seven fingers and two thumbs, he quickly became adept at pushing the keys of his big manual adding machine with those same thumbs and fingers minus one, and his tax business took off in the next few years. He and a fellow Christian farmer got an office in town for a few winter months, and I guess Dad told the Story of His Lost Finger to more than a few curious guys who brought in their shoeboxes of receipts.
(2 Corinthians 11, Psalm 111, Romans 8, Matthew 6)
(posted at davesandel.net)
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