Growing up on a dairy farm, our first introduction to driving farm equipment was the Ford 860, an iconic little red & white tractor built in the 1950’s. Ours was equipped with a 6-foot box-scraper attached to its rear three-point hitch for the purpose of scraping the barnyard.

She went by various names: Pop called her the “860”. Sometimes she was just the “scraper tractor”. But the most common and affectionate moniker we gave to her was “Putt-Putt”, referring to the peculiar sound of her 4 cylinder gasoline engine.

Putt-Putt’s assigned resting spot was creatively named the “Putt-Putt” shed where she spent most of the day sitting quietly, surrounded by dirty rabbit cages, rarely-used step-ladders, an air compressor, and many other half-forgotten miscellaneous farm items.

A Ford 860 similar to the one I grew up with. (Ours was never this clean or shiny, though!)

A rite of passage for my brothers and me was the day we were deemed old enough to take over the daily chore of scraping the barnyard. The prescribed purpose of this event was to move the cow manure which had accumulated over the last 24 hours from the barnyard to the nearby “manure pile”. It was a fun job and one that we often looked forward to. It was however, a bit of a obstacle course.

Scraping the barnyard involved a good bit of maneuvering around the corral gates and the wooden posts of the feed bunk, among other things. It also included a lot of driving in reverse, neck craning, as you backed into the dark alleys of the freestall barn.

It was a well choregraphed dance of motor-skills, one hand gripping the steering-wheel, the other on the 3-point hitch lever ready to raise and lower at the appropriate time. One foot hovering over the clutch, the other resting on the brake.

Once you mastered the Beginner’s level, you would soon be taking advantage of the differential braking system. This feature was quite handy for turning sharp corners in tight places. Need to spin on a dime at high speed on slippery concrete? Just simultaneously cut the steering wheel while pressing the right or left brake. The one rear tractor tire would lock up while the other continued turning at said speed. Physics would take over, aided by the increased inertia of the scraper blade on the rear. 180 degree turn complete. Oh what joy!

The “Putt Putt” would eventually give up the ghost and be replaced by a diesel 70’s model Ford 4000 SU. She was our new scraper-tractor. We named her “Suzie” and my younger brother cut his teeth on her.

Besides scraping the barnyard, both little tractors served other useful purposes in their time. Before the days of our ATV 4-wheeler, we would drive the scraper tractor up our steep hill to bring the cows in from pasture. Years of cow paths and erosion had caused some limestone ridges to become exposed. It was anything but gradual and smooth. If you drove past our farm at the right time on a summer afternoon, you would see a little tractor picking its way up the hill with front wheels bobbing and nose pointed toward the sky. The heavy scraper shifted the center of gravity toward the rear and also acted as a handy “wheelie-bar” to keep you from flipping backwards. This too brought exhilarating joy.

Teaching his sons to scrape the barnyard came at a cost for my Father, however- mostly in the form of the money and time it took to replace the gates and posts which fell victim to the onslaughts of a greenhorn scraper-tractor operator.

Boy, did we ever beat stuff up! Whether it was barnyard accidents or otherwise, we children unleashed our share of collateral damage on the farm. I remember one such time, as one of my siblings pulled into our driveway with a larger tractor pulling a disc harrow behind. They failed to take a wide enough turn, and the disc caught the corner of our garage, leaving behind a gaping hole amidst a tumble of broken concrete blocks.

Time and memory would fail me to tell all the tales those old walls would hold- where youthful vigor and novice skill collided with wood, steel, and concrete.

It’s the price of raising up children. And through it all, I have no memory of Pop getting angry at us. Now as a dad myself, I have new respect for that.

Pop never got upset at us children for bungling jobs that he could have done better.

Mind you now, Pop is not a man who would be described as mild, quiet, or laid-back. His voice (which I didn’t inherit) is quite ample, shall we say. Pop’s never yet been documented as having raised the dead with one of his full-throated yells…but he sure can rouse the sleeping! He’s been known to stop a car in its tracks leaving our driveway with the windows rolled up, the bewildered driver perplexed by the clap of thunder on a blue-sky day.

If you were to make a phone call to Pop from the front yard of our house, and he answered from an open-seated tractor at the back our long field lane, you would experience a curious echo effect. His voice would be reaching your ears via satellite connection AND good old fashioned sound-waves rolling their way in from back-forty. You get the point.

Pop never got upset at us children for bungling jobs that he could have done better.

A Ford 4000 SU similar to our “Suzie”

Tractors die and boys grow into men. But I think teaching our children how to mow the lawn, till the garden, and drive the car point to something even deeper that we Moms and Dads face with each new season of child-training.

Raising children for the Lord is like walking a tight-rope of faith. On one side of the balancing bar is our desire to provide for and shelter them. On the other side is the recognition that without personal, trial-and-error experience, they will experience limited growth.

And so, one step at a time, we prayerfully walk the fine line. We teach them concepts and values. We try to lead by example. We warn of dangers. But at some point, we must step back and let them try to do what we can surely do better. Because, believe it or not- someday that may surpass us.

We must allow them the space to break things.

Can they go swimming with friends? How about that sleepover? Which books do we allow on our shelves? Sending them off to school. That weekend trip. Going on their first date. You name it.

Each parenting decision must balance our intense desire for their physical and spiritual safety with the understanding that our children need to be given enough rope so that they can learn the ropes.

Because, we are raising the next generation. A generation that will need to take the reins of a volatile society. A generation who will lead the Church in perilous times. Wow, that’s heavy.

Thankfully, Father God finishes raising his children, once their parents have tried and done their best. It’s called sanctification.

Thankfully, Father God finishes raising his children, once their parents have tried and done their best. It’s called sanctification.

One of my last major incidents involving farm equipment and defenseless barns happened when I was an older teenager. The job at hand was hauling out the bed-pack manure from our dry cow pen, using our New Holland skid-loader (gone were the days of Putt-Putt and Suzie).

As I exited with another full skid-loader bucket of manure to dump in the spreader, I failed to see how high the boom was raised, and it caught the header above the large sliding door. Hunkering in the cab, I was suddenly engulfed in a deluge of raining concrete blocks along with decades of dust from the loft above. It seemed the whole structure might be collapsing around me!

The aftermath of my handiwork with the skid-loader. (Thankfully, the barn was soon going to be torn down and upgraded anyway)

After the dust settled, and I realized I was still here in the land of the living, I tucked tail and plodded into the house to tell Pop. He was taking his after-lunch nap on the living room sofa, covered in his customary blanket and face-pillow.

“Welp”, I began in a dead-pan phlegmatic tone. “I just got done basically knocking the freestall barn down.”

Pop sat up quickly, rubbing his eyes. His response still makes me chuckle to this day.

There are many ways a Father could respond to a son who just announced he succeeded in wiping out part of Dad’s crucial business infrastructure. I wonder how I would respond today in that situation. “Did you, though?!” doesn’t readily come to mind.

“Did you, though?!” The inflection of his tone would have seemed more fitting if I had just told him we had a new heifer calf born from our best cow…or maybe that I had just single-handedly cleaned out all the calf pens with pitchfork and wheelbarrow, without being told to.

“Did you, though?” That was it. No shouting. No scolding. No belittling.

I had broken something. Again. But it was fixable. Life would continue. Personal experience had taught me a lesson that over-sheltered protectionism never could.

God help me to extend the same grace to my sons. Thanks Pop!