The Farmer Who Heard a Whisper

Eli Jenkins had never been one for nonsense. The land was hard, the seasons were short, and talk didn’t feed the cattle. His boots were older than some of his neighbors, and his faith, if you asked him, was “between me and the good Lord—and not the shouting kind.”

He lived alone on seventy-two acres just outside of Boone’s Creek, with rusting barbed wire fences and wind-chapped hands that told more truth than words ever could. His wife, May, had died nearly seven years before. Cancer took her slow, and he had watched each stage like a man reading a storm in the sky—helpless to stop it, yet braced for what it would bring.

They’d prayed together then, once. Not loud. Not in church. Just her hand in his, the IV humming like a second heartbeat beside them. She whispered, “He’s near,” and smiled with a peace Eli had not been able to find since.

Now the barn sagged in the middle and the fields were tired. And Eli, in his seventy-first year, was beginning to feel that same sag in his soul. He’d wake at four, feed the chickens, check the weather, and try to forget the quiet that followed him like a shadow. Sometimes he read the Bible, mostly Psalms or Ecclesiastes, but he didn’t talk to God anymore. It had been too long. He wasn’t angry—just tired.

One dry September morning, as he knelt to fix a busted water line near the south pasture, he paused. Not because of age or pain, but because of something else. Something like a breath behind him, faint but certain.

“Eli.”

He froze. Stood. Turned. Nothing but the cottonwood trees shivering under a sleepy wind.

He shook his head. “Must be the breeze.”

But it came again two days later. This time as he was mending a fence. A whisper. Clear. Gentle. Just his name.

He looked up into the empty sky. “If that’s You,” he muttered, “You’re late.”

But the third time, something was different. He was in the barn, spreading straw, when the word wasn’t just his name. It was a phrase. Five words. Soft. Low. Certain.

“I remember what you asked.”

Eli dropped the pitchfork. His hands were trembling. He sat down on the feed bin, heart stuttering like an old engine in the cold.

He hadn’t said a prayer out loud in years. But he had thought it. Once. A few weeks back. Half-asleep, half-aching, he had muttered in his mind: “Do You even remember what I asked You, Lord?”

It had been about May. About whether she was still herself. Whether she still smiled. Whether God had, in all His majesty, remembered that small, scared woman in the hospital bed who once whispered, “He’s near.”

And now this whisper. No sermon. No trumpet. Just five words.

Eli didn’t sleep that night. He sat on the porch under a blanket, watching the stars shift across the sky like sheep crossing a pasture.

The next morning, he found the Bible May had underlined. Psalm 34:18 was circled. “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

He didn’t know why the whisper had come now, or what it meant. But he knew it had come.

Days passed. The corn failed early that year. The tractor needed a new belt. And the south fence line broke again. But Eli wasn’t muttering curses under his breath anymore. Sometimes he just hummed hymns he hadn’t thought about in years.

He began walking through the fields in the evenings, sometimes talking out loud. Not like a man talking to the wind, but like one picking up a long-lost conversation. Sometimes he said May’s name. Sometimes he asked questions he didn’t expect answers to.

But always, he listened.

And one early frost morning, as he watched a crow rise alone from the edge of the pasture, he felt it again. That whisper.

This time, not in words. Just presence. The same kind he’d felt when May took her last breath—when she’d said, “He’s near.”

He smiled. Not wide, not bright. Just enough to soften the lines on his weather-worn face.

“Alright then,” he whispered back. “I’ll walk with You.”

And from that day, the farm didn’t look so tired. The barn still leaned, the fences still rusted, but something in the air had changed.

Neighbors noticed. Said Eli looked “lighter.” Asked if his son had come to visit.

“No,” he’d say with a shrug, “just been hearin’ some things lately.”

He never explained more than that. Didn’t need to.

But he did keep a chair on the porch now. A second one. Facing east.

And every morning, before he fed the chickens, he sat in it for just a minute.

Listening.