The Natural Law of Blessings | R. Kent Crookston | 2001

R. Kent Crookston discusses the natural law of blessings. When we are obedient to God's laws, blessings will follow.

This speech was given on March 20, 2001

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"Looking out over this group, I am reminded of a BYU devotional that I attended back when I was a freshman. President Ernest L. Wilkinson was conducting. Just like today, we were on the verge of spring. “Ah, spring!” President Wilkinson said. “What a wonderful season! Spring is that time when a young man’s thoughts turn to that which a young woman has been thinking about all winter long.”

As you learned from my introduction, I am an agronomist. A considerable part of my career has been devoted to improving the production of corn. I begin my remarks with an insight that I have gained from my corn research, an insight that helps me to understand the key to obtaining blessings from heaven.

Let me show you a simple bar graph that shows corn yield as influenced by the previous crop. The best yield was obtained from corn that was grown on a field that had not been planted to corn for five years. The next best yield was from a field on which corn was grown alternately with soybeans. The most depressed yields were all from fields that had been planted to corn following a previous planting of corn for two, three, four, five, or ten years in a row.

The graph illustrates what is referred to among crop scientists as the rotation effect. Those of you who grow tomatoes have learned that they will not yield their best if you repeatedly grow them in the same spot in your garden year after year. A veteran Idaho potato farmer once said that the best rotation for potatoes was a thousand years of sagebrush and one year of potatoes.

There are two significant conclusions that my students and I gathered from our 20 years of research with corn. The first was that the rotation effect was unfailingly reliable. Rotated corn always, not just sometimes, but always gave the best yields. No matter the weather, no matter how we modified our management or inputs of fertilizers or pesticides, we could not lift the yield of continuous corn to the level of a first-year crop. Second, although we did gain some insights, we were never able to determine why that first-year yield boost occurred. We evaluated every physical and biological factor we could think of. We finally accepted that we were working with a law of nature and that we could not divert Mother Nature from her decreed course.

It is about the laws of Mother Nature—or rather about the laws of Mother Nature’s father—that I will speak today. We might refer to Mother Nature’s father as Grandfather Nature—or we might call him God.

I now switch from corn to my family. The youngest of our seven children is a nine-year-old girl named Sadie. Sadie’s favorite home-evening game is what we call “the blessing game.” To play the blessing game we need only our hands and a small treat. M&M’s are good, or raisins. When Sadie starts the game, the rest of us place our hands on our laps, cupped open, and we shut our eyes. Sadie then goes around to each of us, one by one, and either places a treat in our hands or passes us by, leaving our hands empty. When she has finished her round, she calls for us to open our eyes and declare whether we were “blessed” with the small treat or not.

Once we discover who was blessed and who was passed by, we try and ascertain the “law” or condition of the blessing. Did Sadie give a raisin to only those in the circle who had shoes on, or maybe to those who had slept in the tent the night before? You see, some of the qualifications are elusive, and we have to ask for clues. When someone finally guesses the common qualifying prerequisite of the blessed ones, it is that person’s turn, and we all close our eyes and cup our hands again.

One condition of the game, upon which Sadie’s father insists, is that each time we play it, we read three scriptures . . . ”

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