I’m not complaining.
I’m feeling so incredibly blessed at the abundance of produce from the garden. Many days I go outside and pick what is ripe and then come inside and work until dark getting it processed and preserved. Harvest season is hard work!
Two things occurred to me as I was thinking about that this week. First, as we (as a society) get further and further from an agrarian lifestyle, we can very easily miss some of the object lessons in the Bible because so many of them are based on farming or animal husbandry or both. That’s a shame! The words of life are becoming more and more of a mystery to us (as a people) as we get farther and farther from the land.
Secondly, harvesting is hard work. And as I experience that in my garden, I’m wondering if I somehow missed the object lesson: preaching the gospel, letting our lights shine to those around us, exhorting, encouraging, planting seeds - it’s hard work. Do we really understand the dedication that God is asking of us as ambassadors of Christ? Are we content to stroll out to the garden (spiritually speaking) and pick a solitary tomato? Don’t we understand how much time, effort, blood and tears goes into this?
But here’s the really cool part of it: harvest season is the highlight of the whole year. It’s the time when we see the blessings of God. The joy and satisfaction we feel from slicing into a ripe watermelon which cracks before the knife can cut all the way through! That’s the joy and contentment we should feel from working in God’s harvest field. And that spiritual harvest is a lot more meaningful than gallons of green beans or tomatoes or grapes.