My great-grandfather broke the sod on our place with a team of mules.

Four generations of my family have farmed that same ground since.

Wheat, mostly, and a few head of cattle.

Farming teaches you real quick that you're not in charge.

You can do everything right and still lose it all to hail on a Tuesday afternoon.

So farmers pray.

At least the ones I grew up around did.

Every spring, our old priest used to drive out and bless the fields.

I'd stand at the edge of the wheat with my dad while he sprinkled holy water across the rows.

I believed God was watching over that ground.

Then the drought came.

The Years Without Rain

The first dry year, we tightened our belts.

The second year, we sold some cattle we couldn't afford to feed.

By the third year, the wheat came up thin and yellow and blew away before harvest.

The ground cracked open like an old dinner plate.

The bank started calling.

And every single night, I got down on my knees beside the bed and asked God for rain.

I promised Him things.

Daily Mass.

Bigger donations, once we could afford them.

I bargained with Him like He was the guy at the co-op.

Every morning, I walked out on the porch and looked at the sky.

Every morning, it was clear and blue and empty.

The Night I Quit

One night in August, I got a letter from the bank I'd been dreading for months.

I sat at the kitchen table and read it four times.

Then I went into the bedroom, and for the first time in sixty years, I didn't kneel down.

I just lay there in the dark and told God I was done.

I'd done my part.

He hadn't done His.

My wife, June, heard every word.

She didn't argue with me.

She just reached over and held my hand until I fell asleep.

I kept going to Mass after that, because June went and I wasn't going to make her go alone.

But I sat in the pew with my arms crossed.

I didn't sing.

I didn't pray.

I was just there.

The Saint in the Back of the Church

There's an old statue in the back of our church that I'd walked past my whole life without really looking at.

It's a man in plain clothes holding a farm tool, with an angel standing beside him.

One Sunday, waiting for June to finish talking after Mass, I finally read the little plaque.

Saint Isidore the Farmer.

He was a poor laborer in Spain, over nine hundred years ago, who worked another man's land his whole life.

He never owned a single acre.

He went to Mass every morning before work, and the story goes that other workers complained he showed up late to the fields.

When the landowner came to check, he supposedly found angels plowing beside Isidore while he prayed.

I don't know about the angels.

But I stood there a long time thinking about that man.

He worked dirt that wasn't even his, and he trusted God anyway.

I had four generations of land, and I'd quit on God over three bad years.

The Priest Who Didn't Have an Answer

That week, I went to see our parish priest.

I asked him straight out why God didn't answer my prayers.

I expected some kind of explanation.

He surprised me.

He said he didn't know.

Then he opened his Bible to the Book of Job and handed it to me.

A man who lost his herds, his children, and his health, who demanded that God explain Himself.

God never gives Job the explanation.

Instead, He asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, and who sends the rain on the land where no man lives.

I read that passage out loud in his office, and my voice cracked on the word rain.

Father said something I'll never forget.

He said trusting God doesn't mean believing He'll give you what you ask for.

It means believing He's good even when He doesn't.

Five Words

Before I left, he gave me a holy card.

On the front was a painting of Jesus with rays of red and pale light coming from His heart.

At the bottom were five words.

Jesus, I trust in You.

He told me the image came from Saint Faustina, a Polish nun who lived through hard times of her own, and that those five words were the whole prayer.

I put that card in the visor of my pickup.

And I started saying those words every morning when I looked at the sky.

Not asking for rain.

Just saying I trusted Him.

At first, I didn't mean it.

I said it anyway.

Some mornings I said it through my teeth.

Somewhere along the way, it went from a thing I said to a thing I believed.

What Happened to the Farm

I'd like to tell you the rain came the next week and saved everything.

That's not what happened.

We had to sell the north quarter, the ground my great-grandfather broke with his mules.

Signing those papers was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

But here's what else happened.

The men from our parish showed up to help me fix fence that fall without being asked.

The young couple who bought the north quarter turned out to be good people who farm it with care.

June and I prayed together more in those years than we had in our whole marriage.

And the rain did come back, eventually.

It always does, out here.

Just not on my schedule.

Trusting Him Now

I still farm the rest of our place.

I still look at the sky every morning.

I still pray for rain when it's dry.

But I don't bargain anymore.

Jesus prayed in the garden for the cup to pass from Him, and then He said, Not my will, but yours.

If He could pray that, I figure I can too.

That holy card is faded now, still tucked in my visor.

If you're in your own dry season, if you've prayed and prayed and the sky stays empty, I won't pretend I know why.

I just know He hasn't left.

Say the five words, even through your teeth.

He'll take it from there.

Hank is a composite character, and this story is illustrative, inspired by the real experiences of many people who have learned to trust God through hard seasons.

Your turn: Have you been through a season when it was hard to trust God? What helped you through it? Tell us in the comments below.