Shaun's thoughts: Stress can be damaging

It’s been awhile. I know! I have missed you, and I have missed writing. Well, I’m back!

Right now, a lot of the focus is on the stressful situations happening with our fellow farmers and ranchers in the eastern part of our state. Even though there have been numerous ways of assistance being delivered to these folks, it still is a huge loss to them. 

Some of them have lost their life long business. Maybe even a business that has been in their family for generations. THIS IS HUGE. AND DEVASTATING. AND LIFE CHANGING. This is called situational stress, and it can be very damaging.

Situational stress happens when someone experiences a life change that is overwhelming, whether good or bad. There can be positive situational stress as well as bad. 

Good stress can be GOOD. If it is at the appropriate level, it can assist with making change. It can push someone ‘just enough’ to do something really great. If the person listens, it can guide them into a necessary life change. This type of stress isn’t a bad type of stress. It’s good stress.

BAD stress can be very damaging. Bad stress can cause a whole host of problems in the human body. In fact, there is no way they could all be listed here. 

Put yourself in the shoes of someone, a farmer, who has continued on with his father’s tradition of ‘working the land’. He’s grown up watching and learning all of the ‘ins and outs’, the perfect timing, the fixing of equipment, the ways to NOT spend money if at all possible, how to work with a banker if that’s how you do business, how to plan for a ‘bad year’, and above all, he’s grown the ‘heart’ for being a farmer. 

Now picture the farm, all having been planted with thousands of dollars’ worth of seed. It’s suddenly under so much water that it will never recover. In fact, because the water is moving, it is taking not only the precious top soil, but each seed, and carrying it somewhere else. 

When that water recedes, there is literally nothing left. The soil that has been worked, prepped, fertilized and cared for by generations, is suddenly gone. Just that easy.

There will be, in fact, there already are, farmers who are lost, depressed, physically ill with impairments they cannot explain, even suicidal at the thought of the magnitude of what has just happened. Their whole world has just changed. Most of them have never had another career. This is all that they’ve known. 

I’m so proud of the ways our community has reached out to help these folks. They are farmers, ranchers and hard-working individuals like we are. So we understand the devastation. My challenge to each of you is to remember these individual farmers and ranchers in your daily prayers. It will not be over for years. But we do know GOD is already THERE. 

 

The Grant Tribune-Sentinel

308-352-4311 (Phone)

PO Box 67
327 Central Ave in Grant
Grant NE 69140