Stuff

The Faith of a Mustard Seed

Miracles, for the most part, are absolutely useless.  So what if you can move a mountain?  A moved mountain does little more than make those uncertain of their faith somewhat more certain that, if necessary, another mountain might be moveable in the future.  But then, such feats are rarely necessary.  When all is weighed out, it probably would’ve been easier to have gone around the silly thing to begin with.

And then, few people rarely worry about where that mountain was moved to.  Some poor old farmer, mortgaged up to his nose hair just to make ends meet (and not very well at that), is finally able to envision some hope, finally able to think that maybe, just maybe, he and his sainted wife of thirty-four years, who struggles day after day to find new and interesting ways to cook dirt, might be able to some day relax, retire, and not have to work sunup to sundown and then some.  Then suddenly he finds a mountain sitting on his farm.  Let’s face it, try as you might, you simply cannot farm a mountain.  And as for the beets, well, they’re under about a trillion tons of rock.  The poor farmer’s wife, God rest her soul, is too.  Oh well.  Of course, the farmer was counting on his beets to make the mortgage payment.  He was counting on his wife, too.  The banker was duly impressed when suddenly there was a new, cheaper route for the proposed Winesap Freeway.  He also had heartfelt sympathy for the farmer’s losses, especially the beets.  He also foreclosed on the poor schmuck’s mortgage because he couldn’t make his payment.  Luckily, the farmer really didn’t need to be evicted.

It became a complicated legal issue.  The Winesap Brothers, Inc., general contractors with reputed mob connections, claimed that since they had owned the mountain before it was moved, then they still owned it, regardless of where it now sat.  The bank, on the other hand, claimed that since they owned the land below the mountain, then they should consequently have rights to all the land above it.  They were perfectly willing to concede, though, that the Winesap Brothers, Inc., could retain possession of the mountain as long as they provided adequate access to the land beneath it.  A lease agreement was suggested.  The whole mess was tied up in court litigation for years and was finally settled when, quite unexpectedly, a flood killed all contesting parties.

A side note:  The farmer who had owned the land under the mountain to begin with was given one hundred acres of worthless scrub from the Winesap Brothers, Inc., just to make sure he didn’t clutter up the legal process with any silly motions of prior ownership.  That worthless scrub suddenly became most of the southwestern shore on the new Winesap Lake, named after those very same brothers who perished in that tragic flood, and it suddenly became worth just an unimaginable amount of money, since that was the shoreline with the best public access.  Unfortunately, the farmer had signed away his property rights just the day before to the Bidwell Telecommunicational Evangelical Ministries.  Praise the Lord.

One final note:  The farmer died before the proposed Heaven’s Gate Biblical Theme Park on the shores of beautiful Winesap Lake was ever announced.  According to the coroner, he apparently ignited after drinking just a whole bunch of Sterno.  His final words, muttered just before he ignited his cigar (and subsequently himself), and heard by absolutely no one but God and me, were, “The only good miracle is money.”

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