Do Not Be Afraid, O Land

di Nicholas Dailey (Autore)

Lamplight Books, 2026

Farmers filed 315 Chapter 12 bankruptcies in 2025, up 46 percent from the year before, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, and the 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 141,733 fewer farms than five years earlier. A CDC study published in 2023 found that male farmers, ranchers, and agricultural managers died by suicide at a rate of 52.1 per 100,000, far above the 32.0 for working men overall. Behind each of those numbers is a family: a hailstorm, a bank meeting, a father who won't talk about the land, and a man checking markets at two in the morning.Do Not Be Afraid, O Land is a 30-day devotional through the book of Joel. It is written for farm and ranch families in hard times.Joel wrote to farmers after the locusts. "What the devouring locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten" (Joel 1:4). He did not tell them to pretend. He told them to grieve, to gather, and to cry out: "Gather the elders and all the residents of the land to the house of the LORD your God, and cry out to the LORD" (Joel 1:14). Then he called them home: "So rend your hearts and not your garments, and return to the LORD your God" (Joel 2:13). And God answered the land itself: "Do not be afraid, O land; rejoice and be glad, for the LORD has done great things" (Joel 2:21).Alongside that book runs an original story. Brock Wiederholt, 41, farms 2,400 acres in North Dakota, the fifth generation on ground his great-great-grandfather homesteaded in 1904. In July hail took 900 acres of his crop. By January he is carrying $410,000 of unpaid operating debt, hiding the numbers from his wife, and doing life-insurance math in his head. His wife asks him to go sit with Ardell Feist, 76, a retired elevator manager who sat in his pickup in a shelterbelt one February night in 1986 and whose family farm was sold at auction five weeks later. Over one year of Tuesday mornings at six at Hulda's Café, the two read Joel together. The year holds a bank meeting, a visit to the doctor, mediation, a prayer gathering at a country church, an apology to a father, a family meeting around a whiteboard, a quarter of ground sold to a young farmer, forty cows at the sale barn, a harvest, and a young neighbor who needs someone to sit with him. Suicide is described only in outline, never with method.Inside the book:- 30 days. Every day includes a passage from the Berean Standard Bible, a Mentor and Student conversation, a reflection, a practice (one concrete step), a one-line word "From the Field," a prayer, and journal questions- Honest: it never says a hailstorm is God's punishment, never promises that faith will save the farm, and never treats a sale as a man's failure- Back matter: practical help for farm families (your numbers, a one-page farm snapshot, talking with your lender, FSA loans, agricultural mediation, legal help and Chapter 12, crop insurance, succession, selling land or livestock, off-farm work, stress and depression, suicide warning signs and safe storage, and talking with children); help lines; a chapter for neighbors, spouses, grown children, lenders, and churches; background on Joel; a six-session group guide; and a Scripture indexAbout 15â€"20 minutes a day, or one part a week with a group.Brock, Ardell, and everyone in Brunsdorf are invented characters, and the bank and mediation details in the story are simplified. This is a devotional, not financial, legal, medical, or psychological advice, and not a substitute for a lender, financial counselor, mediator, attorney, doctor, or counselor. It includes emergency and help-line information for the U.S. (911, 988, the Crisis Text Line, and the Farm Aid Farmer Hotline at 1-800-FARM-AID). This book was written with the assistance of AI writing tools, under the author's direction. Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (public domain). Every Scripture quotation was checked word for word against its source.

• Autore: Nicholas Dailey
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Lamplight Books
• Formato: EPUB3 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798237074987