Arm Wrestling the World for God, by Kevin Wells

It’s mud season in flyover country, so the broad-shouldered men from South Dakota farms dragged the bottoms of their boots against snow piles and kicked at a concrete riser before walking into a recent Catholic men’s retreat. It was a bad morning to leave the farm. The weather was a sunny 29 degrees, sweatshirt weather—a production day. It was minus-32 in the open-prairie wind a week earlier, when farmers reached for udders with stiff fingers and crystals on their eyelashes.

There’s a chance a few men interiorly swore at the bad luck of the retreat falling on a rare warm winter morning, when greater volumes of work could get done; but God and commitment come first here. The un-mucked stalls, hog slaughtering, and blizzard of obligations back in Aurora, Bushnell, White, and Johnsonville could wait. …

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