God’s Care in Calhoun County
Ray and I recently visited Calhoun County, Illinois, with members of our family.
Calhoun County is a peninsula almost surrounded by the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Visitors enter it on one of its three ferries or its lone bridge.
We took the Golden Ferry across the Mississippi River. I was giddier than our grandsons, as I remembered when my parents took my brother and me across the Mississippi on a ferry when we were children.
Calhoun County is a rural county with excellent agricultural land. It has a population of less than 6,000. This pretty barn was perched . . .
. . . on one of the area’s low, but steep, hills.
These beautiful fields stretched out beside this 90 degree turn in that country road.
Calhoun County is famous for its apple and peach orchards.
We were blessed to be there during peach season.
More than 200,000 waterfowl visit the Two Rivers National Wildlife Refuge each spring and fall. I hope to go back sometime during their migrations.
I was excited when we came upon this squadron of pelicans on that bright and sunny Saturday in July.
I wondered what to call this group of pelicans. A National Park Service source called a group of pelicans a brief, pod, pouch, scoop, or squadron. I liked squadron best. They took off from the water as if taking turns on an aircraft carrier with first a few and then more and then more and more.
I am in awe at how God provides crops and peaches and apples and all we need season after season and year after year.
Look at the birds of the sky,
that they do not sow, nor reap,
nor gather crops into barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not much more important than they?
Matthew 6:26