by Jason Brown
As nice as all the publicity was, we didn’t get very many donations out of it. Admittedly, we weren’t really soliciting any. As far as the world outside our farmhouse walls thought, I was still a rich former NFL player. People assumed I had all the money in the world to do what I was doing. He doesn’t need my help, many people likely were thinking. That was just fine. I didn’t want them to know that I needed help either. I was a big, strong ex–football player. I was used to pushing around three-hundred-pound nose tackles. I sure wasn’t going to admit weakness. I wasn’t going to tell people that my fortune had drained away.
But one man who heard our story did come forward with an unusual offer.
“I think it’s great what you guys are doing,” the gentleman (who prefers to remain anonymous) said in an email shortly after our story went viral. “I was really touched. And I wanted to know: Do you need any equipment? If I can help you, please contact me.”
I didn’t bother. I went on to other things and nearly forgot the offer.
There’s an old joke about a preacher stuck in a flood, sitting on top of his roof. He prays to God, begging for help. A man comes by in a boat and tells him to hop in.
“No,” the preacher says. “I’m praying to God.”
The waters keep rising. Another man comes by in a speedboat, offering to help. The preacher says no. He rejects help from a rescuer in a helicopter too. He rejects all aid, but the preacher continues to pray to God to save him until, in the end, the floodwaters cover him.
When he gets to heaven, the preacher walks up to God and says, “I’m glad I’m here, God, but why didn’t You save me?”
God looks at him and says, “What more did you want from Me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”
I was like that preacher on the roof. In my pride, I didn’t want to accept help from a stranger. I wanted God to bless me, but I wanted Him to bless me the way I thought He should bless me. In a way that I expected Him to bless me, not through a stranger’s email. We barely had the money to keep the internet on, but I let the gentleman’s note go without even a response.
Two weeks later, he wrote back.
“Hey, I love what you guys are doing,” it said. “I still want to help if I can. Let me know.” There was a phone number in the email too.
This time, Tay wasn’t going to let the opportunity go.
“Jason, please humble yourself,” she said. “This might be just what you were praying for, all right? Just talk to this gentleman.”
I probably sighed heavily. I was thinking there was no way this “gentleman” was all he presented himself to be. He couldn’t be interested in only helping us, no matter how touched he said he was by our story. If he’d just sent twenty dollars to us, we would’ve accepted it gladly. But offering help in buying equipment? There was more to it than that. There had to be.
But I called him up—to make Tay happy.
He answered the phone and seemed glad I called. He repeated how much he valued what we were doing. He repeated his offer to help with equipment. When I didn’t answer right away, he went on.
“So, can I help you with anything? Any equipment you need for the farm? Some machinery? An attachment for your tractor?”
Tractor. Months before, I’d been weeping and shouting in my field. The flies had been biting me. My borrowed Allis-Chalmers sounded like it was dying. In my frustration and my anger and my desperation, I’d called out for something.
“Sir, I have been praying for something, actually,” I finally blurted. “I’ve been praying for a tractor.”
Just like that, the gentleman on the other end of the phone was off and running.
“A tractor!” he said. “Of course! You’d need a good tractor with as big a farm as you have. A really good tractor, a reliable one. Something like a John Deere,” he said. “At least a hundred-horsepower one, I’d imagine.”
“It gets pretty hot out there, too, doesn’t it?” he added, barreling on. Before I could answer, he said, “Yep, it needs to have an enclosed cab. With air-conditioning.”
He started rattling off not just what my tractor needed but what I’d asked for, as if he’d been standing beside me in the field that day. He kept talking about my tractor, a tractor that no matter how good a deal this guy’s going to cut for me I know I’ll never be able to afford. Finally, I cut him off.
“Hold on a second!” I said. “Listen, I know you’re trying to be kind, trying to do me a favor, but I don’t know you from Adam. I do know that nothing comes for free. What do you want from me? Do you want me to sign autographs? Endorse a product? Do you want me to show up somewhere and make an appearance? A speech? What’s the catch? Tell me the catch and then maybe we can work on a deal.”
I waited for him to speak.
“Jason, God told me to reach out to you and ask if you needed any help with equipment,” he said. “The only obligation you have is to continue being obedient to the Holy Spirit, the same way that I’m being obedient to the Holy Spirit right now.”
I didn’t know this guy. I didn’t know anything about him. He was following a call from God, just like I was. His call was to give me a tractor. Not work out a great deal for a tractor—actually give me one.
Not long after, he arranged a three-way call with a local John Deere dealer, and the man—I still don’t know anything about him—was clearly a fierce negotiator. Some sports agents I know could glean some tips from him. I told the dealer what kind of tractor I needed, and then the gentleman just, well, took over. He talked them down on the price to the point where it was almost ridiculous.
“And another thing,” the gentleman told the dealer. “You’re going to deliver this tractor to Mr. Brown’s farm with a full tank of fuel.”
“Um, I’m afraid we don’t do that,” the dealer said. “We’ve never delivered a tractor to anyone with a full tank.”
“You’re going to do it with this deal,” the gentleman said. If he’d been a coach in the NFL, he could’ve talked a referee into calling a safety when the line of scrimmage was on the fifty-yard line.
The next day, I got a check in the mail for the tractor, made out to the dealer. A few weeks later, the tractor was delivered to my farm. With a full tank of gas.
That was January of 2015. I’d prayed to God for a tractor the previous summer, asking for a tractor just like the one that, just half a year later, was parked outside my farmhouse.
In my 2014 temper tantrum, I’d asked God to deliver me a great tractor in twelve months. God didn’t just answer my prayer; He showed up early.
Overflowing
Walk in faith, God had told me. And so I walked. I walked away from the NFL, walked away from a comfortable life, walked away from all the money I thought I needed to survive in this new adventure. At the beginning of 2014, I didn’t have a tractor, didn’t have a crop, didn’t even have money for seed. I didn’t have anything but a hope and a prayer…and a God who could do miracles.
A year later, North Carolina’s charities had another 120,000 pounds of sweet potatoes to put to use, and I had a tractor that could make sure those potatoes would be an annual gift.
In the book of Joel, we find this passage:
Be glad, people of Zion,
rejoice at what the Lord your God has done for you.
He has given you the right amount of autumn rain;
he has poured down the winter rain for you
and the spring rain as before.
The threshing places will be full of grain;
the pits beside the presses will overflow with wine and olive oil.
I will give you back what you lost
in the years when swarms of locusts ate your crops. (2:23–25, GNT)
I know there are people out there—even Christians—who don’t believe that Go
d takes an active interest in our lives. I know that some people believe that the age of miracles is long gone. They say that God doesn’t part seas for His believers anymore. He doesn’t feed five thousand people with a little bit of bread and a couple of fish.
Don’t believe that. Our God is a mighty God, and His resources never falter. Using First Fruits Farm, He fed more than five thousand people, using far less than a few loaves and fishes: He used me. And He blessed me in the process.
Walk in faith, God told me. And I’d encourage you to do the same. Walk in faith, my brothers and sisters. God has wonderful miracles in store for you.
CHAPTER 9
Failure and Faithfulness
That first harvest was a game changer. When we bought First Fruits Farm, many folks around here thought I must’ve been crazy—certified insane. No one laughed at me to my face, but behind my back? Plenty chuckled at this big rich guy without a clue. And had the situation been reversed—had I been a longtime North Carolina farmer, and some know-nothing NFL vet suddenly decided to move next door and grow sweet potatoes—I might’ve laughed too. I can’t picture Tom Brady bushwhacking on my land. But sixty tons of potatoes later, folks weren’t laughing at me anymore. I was a success. People started coming up to me and calling me the sweet-potato whisperer.
I knew that I wasn’t the reason we had such a successful harvest. It was all God. I think that He knew that with all the setbacks I’d suffered, I needed a victory. I’d felt lost. Helpless. Forsaken. That first year of farming was a morale boost—confirmation that I was doing the right thing. God was telling me, Don’t worry, Jason. I haven’t left you. I’m here. God showed up in a big way in 2014, and I couldn’t take credit.
Still, sweet-potato whisperer had a nice ring to it!
Yes, I knew God was behind my success. And I assumed that, with God’s help, every following year would be just as awesome as the previous one. It’s like what Paul wrote in Romans 8:31: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
And, yes, a little ego started creeping back into my soul. Publicly, I gave God all the credit. Deep inside? I was thinking to myself, Hey, I’m a pretty good farmer! Our God is indeed an awesome God, and I was an awesome follower. Together, we’d fill the bellies of the hungry and needy with sweet potatoes.
With my confidence in full swing, and with my pride helping it along, I started running off at the mouth.
“We farmed five acres in 2014? We’re going to double it in 2015,” I started telling people. “We grew 120,000 pounds of sweet potatoes last year? We’re going to harvest 200,000 pounds this year.” Truthfully, I thought I was underestimating what First Fruits Farm would produce. I hoped our harvest would be more like 250,000 pounds—another amazing bumper crop. With God in our corner, I figured bumper crops were going to be the norm.
But I wasn’t done yet. I planned that after the crop was brought in on November 7, First Fruits Farm would throw an incredible harvest festival for all the volunteers who helped pick sweet potatoes that day. We’d have food. Music. Live entertainment. It was going to be an amazing celebration. We were going to show the world—or, at least, the Triangle area of North Carolina—that our God can do anything.
We planted our fields that spring, and, man, was it beautiful.
And then the rains stopped.
We experienced an extremely dry summer—one of the driest I remember. Without rain, the potatoes struggled to get a footing. And those that did—well, the deer were waiting for them.
While sweet potatoes are a popular crop in North Carolina, I’m the only farmer locally who grows them. Deer, as it turns out, love sweet potatoes. They love the vines. They love the potatoes themselves. They love everything about them. They’ll dig up the potato plants with their front hooves and pull them straight out of the ground. Although they didn’t notice my field in 2014, by 2015, the secret was out. The deer must’ve spread the news through their secret deer network or talked about it at their local watering hole. They must’ve said, “Hey, guys, this dumb farmer over here is planting a whole ten-acre crop of sweet potatoes, and it’s just for us!”
Deer don’t have the decency to actually finish eating what they start. They’re so trifling that they’ll dig up a sweet potato, take one dainty bite of it, and then move on to the next plant. They’ll nibble at that second plant for a moment and then, as if unimpressed with the quality of that one, too, move down the row to a third plant. They’re the strangest blend I’ve ever seen of being completely ravenous and wildly finicky. Do they taste one of my sweet potatoes and say, “Well, that’s an okay sweet potato, but the next one’s bound to taste so much better”? Are they marking their sweet-potato territory with their teeth?
I’m no deer psychologist, so I can’t say. All I know is that after having very little pressure from deer in 2014, an army of the animals seemed to surround every new bit of growth in 2015. If the deer owned an NFL ground mower, they couldn’t have cut down my sweet potatoes more efficiently.
The fields looked bleaker and sparser as the summer wore on. We farmers are taught to check on our crops throughout the year—dig up a mound here and there to better estimate what the yield is going to be. And as I dug up my test mounds, the results were…not encouraging.
That didn’t matter! I still had faith that God would give us a great harvest, just like I’d seen in a movie.
The movie was called Faith Like Potatoes, a Christian drama based on a true story. In it, a farmer moves to South Africa, becomes a Christian, and—bucking advice from scientists and fellow farmers and plain old common sense—plants potatoes during a terrible drought. Why? Because the Lord told him to, of course. And his faith was rewarded by a massive harvest of potatoes.
Hey, I was a farmer! I was called by God! And I grew potatoes too! Sure, my sweet potatoes aren’t even that closely related to regular potatoes, but still, I knew that I needed to have faith like potatoes. I knew that despite the lack of rain, despite the rather paltry test mounds I was digging up, despite the fact that apparently every deer in North Carolina was migrating to my farm, God was going to do a mighty miracle for us.
“In This World You Will Have Trouble”
We love happy endings. Had this book ended with the 2014 harvest or with my miraculous tractor, it would’ve been just what Hollywood would want: a happily-ever-after ending, where the crops were always bountiful, the sun always shone, and the deer ate their own dang food.
Look at the Bible and you’ll see a more realistic depiction of life. Joseph’s deliverance of his brothers led to the captivity in Egypt. Moses’s walk out of Egypt got him to the Promised Land, all right, but that land was full of hundreds of years of strife and disobedience. The temple of God was built and torn down, rebuilt and torn down again. Even after we’ve had great success, life has a frustrating habit of reversing course—sometimes because of our own mistakes, sometimes because God still has lessons to teach us, and sometimes for reasons we might never know until we ask God in person.
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” Ecclesiastes 3 begins in the King James Version. Football players and farmers, of course, pattern their lives by very literal seasons: With football, you’ve got the football season (naturally) and the off-season. In farming, you follow spring, summer, and winter religiously—planting early in the year, reaping late.
But those seasons have seasons too—seasons of success and of unexpected challenges.
Sports can teach you how to deal with those highs and lows. When I was with the Ravens, we alternated between winning seasons and losing years like clockwork. Mentally, I knew that farming had its own seasons too. You couldn’t grow a bumper crop every year. When I had money, I planned to use that cushion to ride out the bad years in preparation for the good ones.
But in 2015, I wasn’t ready to accept the ebb and flow just yet. My money was gone
, but my faith was full. God loved me; this I knew. And because of that, I figured He wanted to reward my faith with success.
“God, I know You’re with me,” I said. “There’s no failure in You.”
As harvest day approached, my sweet potatoes weren’t looking any better. Even the deer were losing interest in our scant crop. But I wasn’t about to give up. We held a registration for volunteers to help us with our harvest, and more than one thousand people signed up. When we closed down the registration, I kept hearing from more and more people who wanted to come. I didn’t want to turn anybody away, so I encouraged anyone who wanted to come pick sweet potatoes to come pick sweet potatoes. God would make sure we had plenty. As harvest day grew closer, I was estimating that we might have as many as fifteen hundred people show up at our farm, ready to work.
As more and more people volunteered to help, the weather forecast for that Saturday grew more and more ominous. After a summer with hardly any rain, meteorologists were predicting a heavy downpour that day.
But I still had my faith! I was confident that if I did just the right things, I’d be able to move the hand of God in my favor. I started fasting on the Sunday before the harvest. I was going to have faith like potatoes, faith that could move mountains.
In reality, all of this “faith” was really just my own pride talking. I’d told everybody that First Fruits Farm would harvest 200,000 pounds of sweet potatoes this year. I had boasted. I had bragged. And even though I said it was all about God, it was about me, too, because I was the sweet-potato whisperer. I had a reputation to protect.
God knew I needed to be humbled.