In God’s perfect world, when you need something, the good steward, within whom God will have planted the seed meant to provide for you, will have nurtured it to full and healthy growth for you to harvest. The planting and the harvest are a natural course of events in God’s world, material and spiritual.
I grew up on the farm so this cycle was the rhythm of my life. It provided a certain security of being connected to the earth and a relationship with God to send the rain and sunny days in a timely manner so we could harvest enough to sustain our family and give provision for the next year. As the winter ended, and the days became longer and warmer, it was an exciting time to see my dad get the equipment ready for the planting of the corn. My mother too, would begin planning the family vegetable garden.
“How blessed you will be, sowing your seed by every stream, and letting your cattle and donkeys range free.” Isaiah 32:20 NIV “The land yields its harvest; God, our God, blesses us.” Psalms 67:6 NIV “The LORD will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield its harvest. Psalms 85:12 NIV “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” Gen. 8:22 NIV
As an adult, I learned that farming is more than just making a living, it is a way of life based on faith and a relationship with the Great Giver of life. The planting and harvest shaped who I am today. The scriptures are filled with references about this natural process. I believe it is the process by which God intended for us to understand the abundant life we could have on this earth. I believe he intended for us to understand who he is and our relationship to him through our stewardship over the earth.
God described himself to the prophet Isaiah as the life-giving elements of planting and harvest: “This is what the LORD says to me: ‘I will remain quiet and will look on from my dwelling place, like shimmering heat in the sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.’” Isaiah 18:4 NIV
Without the sunshine and dew, there would be no harvest. In our relationship with God we are most content when we recognize that: “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” Psalm 24:1 NIV
Isaiah presents this image in 17:5 “It will be as when reapers harvest the standing grain, gathering the grain in their arms . . .” I experienced that as a child. Dad would hook up our tractor to the binder and pull it through the field of oats while it cut and bundled the grain. My brothers and sisters and I would follow behind and shock the oats, standing several bundles together upright in the field. A crew that traveled with the threshing machine, generally neighbors, would come to our field where a hayrack would have begun going through the field gathering the sheaves of grain to be put into the threshing machine and the plump, golden grain would shoot out the other side into a wagon or truck. The oats would then be stored in our barn as loose grain to be fed to our livestock or taken to market if we had an especially good year. I remember my mother and a few women from the neighborhood would be setting up tables in the yard laden with homegrown food – most likely fried chicken from my mother’s flock, freshly killed and dressed that morning for the celebration and pies made from the fruit harvested in our neighborhood. These are some of my fondest memories. The harvest was a time of coming together in community, sharing the labor and rejoicing in it.
“Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest.” Exodus 34:21 NIV
I long for those days once more, not for myself, but for mine and everyone else’s children to experience how being connected to the earth through the seasons of planting and harvest changes us to a more inclusive culture filled with hope no matter who you are. We were not middle-income level by any stretch of my imagination today, but at the time we didn’t think about socio-economic levels. If we applied ourselves honestly to any worthy endeavor we were rewarded for it with recognition and opportunity. We grew up with respect for others and ourselves. These are values that we can still have without the farming element. This is community for all.
Celebrating the harvest began long before my generation. God implemented it into every aspect of life with his special family. As part of God’s gift of redemption he established a family who would be his people. The nation of Israel was meant to be God’s shining light for all the earth to know him as the living God and creator of all things.
Rita Foster is a Texas County author and writer.