A huge moon was rising out of the low clouds and the air was moist and full of dust. But the thing that reminded me most were the combines working the fields, trying to get the crop off in time.
Micah asked what those lights were in the fields in the night and I told him. When harvest hit's around here, it's all hands on deck and you and your family and friends work 24 hours a day running the combines and trucks so you can get the harvest off.
I got an email from a rural pastor yesterday. He wrote:
"I am looking forward to some tractor time. There is something very powerful about being out in the fields, watching the grain come out of the combines. Something spiritual. You know how it is as a pastor always trying to come up with a parallel or illustration. I was thinking about the wheat in the stalk, safe, protected in it´s sheath. But the only way the fruit, the real value of the harvest, can be collected is for the stalk to be cut down and the bejeebers knocked out of it in the combine. Only then does it let go of the kernel. The wheat kernels are collected and all the rest is discarded out the back in a cloud of dust and scattered.
Like our lives, everything seems safe, everything seems to be the way we want it to be. Then this big machine comes and knocks us down and around until we don´t know what is going on, but out of the midst of the storm the real value of our character and faith is revealed, collected - harvested. The stuff that we had thought was our safety and our strength has been chopped up and scattered.
Anyway, lots of time to think when you´re on the tractor!!"
A great picture, during a classic prairie harvest time.
That pastor paints a pretty dead on picture. I should know about harvest time seeing as I live on the farm with my dad. What would Saskatchewan be like without farmers in the fields in the pitch dark of the evening??? I for one surely think that it would be different.
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