Articles
I Believe in the Harvest
I love Saturday mornings...
It’s the only day of the week I don’t have to get up early , but do anyway. It’s peaceful , sort of like Christmas morning before everyone gets up. Everything is magnified and yet simplified … Its reflective. I will sit here with my coffee , computer , my bible and my deep concern for a lost world and wondering “What part I can play in this? Can I do more ? Am I serving myself, or serving others?
… What more can I do to change things?...
These thoughts and I mentally wrestle while I sit in the silence of my Saturday morning and the answer is always the same - I will never be able to do ENOUGH , but I refuse to do NOTHING…Psalms 126:5-6 says “Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting. He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed, Shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him”...
He is referring to The Harvest.
One of the most moving stories I have ever heard came from an evangelist working in West Africa. He tells of family in a village and the process of “The Harvest”.. In this region all the moisture comes in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. The year’s food, of course, must all be grown in those four months.
October and November…these are beautiful months. The granaries are full — the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The grain is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday’s Cream of Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep.December comes, and the granaries start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal. Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day…By February, the evening meal diminishes.The meal shrinks even more during March and children succumb to sickness. You don’t stay well on half a meal a day.April is the month that you hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of food...
Then, inevitably, it happens.
A six-or seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. “Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got grain!” he shouts. “Son, you know we haven’t had grain for weeks.” “Yes, we have!” the boy insists. “Out in the hut where we keep the goats — there’s a leather sack hanging up on the wall — I reached up and put my hand down in there — Daddy, there’s grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!”The father stands motionless. “Son, we can’t do that,” he softly explains. “That’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and starvation. We’re waiting for the rains, and then we must use it.” The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unreasonable thing imaginable…
Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt!
WHY? …Because he BELIEVES in “The Harvest”...
And so do I.
"Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting" it says... Evangelism will cost you something - whether it is time ,talent or tears (maybe all 3) make no mistake - It WILL cost you... But ANYTHING that is valuable SHOULD - and I can think of nothing more valuable than the human soul that Christ came to redeem... Tears in the sowing ,brings joy in the shouting - "Hallelujah , another has come home"!
To truly find yourself , you MUST lose yourself in SERVICE.. So I’m going to go , and get lost...
How about you?
Read Mathew 9:37 and Luke 10:2
