There’s a cool wind blowing in the trees this morning—what my mother calls “a little touch of fall in the air.” The heat of another summer is passing, the chilly winds of harvest season are here, at least in the morning.
As the weather cools, we’re coming to the end of the strangest, most turbulent year in my adult memory, though I have vague childhood recall of the 1960s. And there’s some comfort for me in the changing season, in the constants of nature. No matter what turmoil humans create, nature will continue on its course.
Harvest season will always remind me of my Uncle Bud, whom we lost recently. I won’t write much about him here because he was a very private person, and I don’t think he would appreciate being put on “that computer.” (I can see him shaking his head as I type.) But I will say that my cousins and I had a great example, in Uncle Bud, and continue to have a great one in Uncle Chick—brothers and cotton farmers—of stewardship, of respect for the land that sustains us and humble gratitude to God, who gives it to us.
There’s a special peace in the simple cycle of seeds in the ground, rain and sun from above, and red fields covered with clouds of cotton. It makes me think of a passage from John, when Christ teaches about stewardship of our spiritual landscape:
Jesus said to them,
“My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me,
and to finish His work.
Do you not say,
‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’?
Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields,
for they are already white for harvest!
And he who reaps receives wages,
and gathers fruit for eternal life,
that both he who sows and he who reaps
may rejoice together.
John 4: 34-36
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