Yesterday we considered that Jesus’ life, for all the romanticism that comes with this time of year, was difficult. Consider, after the visit of the Wise Men, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees:

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. (Matthew 2.13 – 15, NIV)

It’s hard for us to imagine (and even harder for our children) in this age of wealth and instant gratification that life has not always been as most of us experience it and still isn’t in most parts of the world.

I’m reading The Wizard and the Prophet, recommended by Seth Goden. I’m not all that far into it, maybe 20%. It’s a fascinating story of two men who have influenced thought in two different ways. What I want to draw your attention to now is the background of Norman Borlaug, born in northeast Iowa in 1914, just over 100 years ago. This section about his boyhood jumped out at me in our affluent age:

When not in school the Borlaug children did chores, rising before dawn and working until after sunset. Boys hoed weeds, dug potatoes, milked cows, stacked hay, hauled wood and water, fed chicken, cattle, and horses. Girls tended the vegetable garden, worked the washboard, cleaned house, mended clothing, cooked meals. The toil never ended but complaint was rare. The Borlaugs were subsistence farmers, and if they wanted to eat there was no alternative. Norm boy worked dutifully but without enjoyment. He particularly detested harvesting maize. Every ear had to be sliced from the plant, husked on the spot, and flung into a wagon. The sharp leaves cut through gloves and clothes; the boy was scraped and bleeding by the end of the day. According to Noel Vietmeyer, a longtime co-worker who wrote a biography of Borlaug, an Iowa family with a forty-acre maize plot, typical for the time, hand-picked half a million ears every fall. It was, Borlaug told Vietmeyer, a “two-month horror.” – The Wizard and Prophet by Charles C. Mann, page 102.

Jesus’ life was closer to what Borlaug experienced than the lives most of us are privileged to live.

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. (Matthew 12.1, ESV)

And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9.58, ESV)