A pastor asked an older farmer, decked out in bib overalls, to say grace for the men's group breakfast. "Lord, I hate lard," the farmer began. The pastor opened one eye to glance at the farmer, wondering where this was going.

The farmer loudly proclaimed, "Lord, I hate buttermilk." Now the pastor was growing concerned.

Without missing a beat, the farmer continued, "And Lord, you know I don't much care for raw white flour." The pastor once again opened an eye to glance around the room and saw that he wasn't the only one to feel uncomfortable.

Then the farmer added, "But Lord, when you turn up the heat, mix them all together, and bake them, I do love warm, fresh buttermilk biscuits. So Lord, when things come up that we don't like, when life gets hard, when we don't understand what you're trying to teach us, help us to just relax and wait until you are done mixing and baking. It will probably be even better than buttermilk biscuits. Amen.

My wife Cheryl had me take her to the ER on Nov. 6 because of excruciating back pain that had been coming on for the past 6-8 weeks: she could barely walk due to the pain. They did a CT scan and an MRI: the diagnosis was a fractured L4 vertebra and bulging disks between L3, L4, and L5 vertebrae. She's using a rollator or a cane almost all the time now. Pray that we will discover what the Lord is cooking up for us, and that she will recover safely from the cementing the fracture and spinal fusion surgery on Dec. 10 to resolve this problem.