#41 The Drought of 2016

5 AM October 6th, 2016. It was dark, the sun was still hiding behind the refuge of the horizon, but the time of day was not relevant to the work that Darren had yet to do for the day. Darren was just now getting in from feeding cattle; due to the extreme lack of moisture, the pastures had burned out in late July and Darren had been forced to buy hay and move all the cattle to the yard. In turn, he was plagued with yet another task to attend to in the early and dark hours of the morning. This presented a large problem because without a big corn crop, due to the drought, there was virtually no standing crop left to make silage with, so henceforth arose the dilemma of acquiring feed for the rest of the winter. And to this problem, Darren had no solution; he was between a rock and a hard place with the only decision left being to sell the cattle and get an alternative job to continue his farm payments. It was the hardest year that Darren had ever endured; the few little moments he got to sit down and relax at breakfast and dinner was the only time he wasn't on his feet and moving all day. It had been four months since the last rain and Darren had been running on less than four hours of sleep for months on end and now had gone two days without a shower or a single second of sleep. He was at the point of breaking, but wasn't about to give of on his family farm. So, as he had every morning his whole life, he poured a mug of coffee and laid out his plan for the day.

And just at that moment arrived the last man on earth that he wanted to talk to, Greg Darmin, the banker to which Darren owed over two million dollars. Shoot. I can't do this today; I have 3 cattle waters to fix before dawn, thought Darren. Darren did not have the energy to participate in the eminent argument with the creditor, so he did just as he had numerous times before. Darren jumped into his boots, fastened his lid on his coffee thermos, and commended his escape. He ran up the stairs and into the spare closet, all with extreme stealth. In the back corner above a few boxes there was a window where he planned to make his escape.
As Darren was standing in front of the window with a look of humility on his face, tears began to well up in his eyes as he thought about the mess that his life had become. He thought about his wife, Betty Lou, that he had lost just about a year ago now and the child that they had miscarried just a few weeks before her accident; he thought about the emotional hell that he went through and he tried to remember just how he had pulled through that tough time. He remembered that every time he had gone through something so bad, he had always had someone to turn to. But since his mother's stroke, he had really only one person left to turn to, and that was God.
Wait, that's just it, I have God, thought Darren, with great hope. He immediately took off down the hall for his room; frantically, he searched through this bed stand for his bible.

“Found it!!" he exclaimed.

Then he began to pray. “Dear God, please give me a sign in this time of distress.” He then said a Hail Mary and set his bible on his desk. Darren then took his bible and set it down on his bedside table and kneeled before it. He closed his eyes and reached his hand out for his bible and blindly flipped it open to a page and put his finger down. He opened his eyes with great desperation and under his finger he saw the words “Chapter 7.”

Definition of chapter 7 bankruptcy

“Chapter 7,” also called "liquidation" or "straight bankruptcy," is the process by which a debtor's assets are sold, creditors receive payment, and you are then free from your debts.

The End