I have a brown thumb.

I haven’t been instructed well in the ways of farming. I’ve tried to piece together an education for myself on YouTube, but every year I fail to do something right.

Thankfully, our livelihood won’t change if my thumb doesn’t.

The Ingalls family, on the other hand, lived when an education in farming, hunting, and homemaking was crucial for life. In the mid 1800s, they had to make a livelihood from nearly nothing. They didn’t have modern day tools, but they knew how to craft butter from raw milk, sew fashionable dresses from hand, build a house from scratch, and dig a well in the middle of a prairie. They had to know these things for survival.

Still, there were times in the Ingalls’ lives when no regular instruction was enough to fix a problem. Like us, they depended on the whispering of the Holy Spirit. How do you survive running with a pack of wolves? What do you do when you’re caught in a snow storm? How do you stay safe after you’ve slapped a bear by accident? God always instructed them. They survived.

Sometimes we are in situations that require God’s expertise. We, too, can trust God’s Spirit to whisper answers to us.