A HARVEST OF LOVE

The fields harvested under a blazing blue sky captured my attention, slowly I pulled to the side of the road to soak in the pastoral setting. I am mesmerized by the vastness of farms waving with corn or land freshly mowed and hayed; surely years of childhood play between stalks of growing grain have shaped my soul and held my longing heart in open spaces and sustaining fields. Mounds of collected hay makes me wonder about what we gather through the years, not just in the season of growing, but how what we plant deeply within us comes to fruition and even defines us.

We build fences to hold in what is ours and that which we do not want others to touch or tread upon; secretly we sow into our emotional lives and later realize we do not always reap what brings life. We pile up resentment into bales of anger; our hurts fill our barns to overflowing with an unwillingness to extend mercy. Our whole interior world can hold so much pain that we are paralyzed by the gleanings we have gathered and these fuel our continued outrage and silent fury. If this is hard for you to believe, think for a moment about how you process the pain of the world right now: some of us go to fear, some are furious, some terrified, but few of us have learned to lean into the One who, "is before all things and holds all things together." Colossians 1:17 

We reap what we sow, examined or unexamined, intended or not. Peer carefully into the storehouses of your soul and ask yourself if you find faith, hope and love there. Only three things remain, Paul tells us at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, "And now these three things remain, faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." Jesus gives startling words to us in the Beatitudes, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Matthew 5:44 Let us continue to pray for those being persecuted, yes, but let us also pray for the persecutors. Are we, "rooted and established in love," as Paul prays in Ephesians 3:17? We cannot hold both fear and love in the ground of our being; as we cultivate love we find fear has less of a hold on us. We are loved and can gather grace and extend mercy from this place, even for the ones who persecute us.

The fields are ripe for harvest, what is being harvested in yours?

Medicine from Sacred Writings:

"For not by laboring and sweating, not by fatigue and suffering, but merely as being beloved of God we receive what we receive."

John Chrysostom   Fourth Century