Sowing and Reaping

by Barbara Latta

Foggy beach at Jekyll
Island

This week Ken and I attended the Georgia HOG Rally on Jekyll Island with our friends, Russ and Cindy McGee. The trip was fun despite the fact that we were on an island off the coast of Georgia and didn’t see the sun until the day we left to go home. That’s OK because at least we did not get rained on.

The trip takes about four hours and we travel through South Georgia farm country. We passed peach orchards, cotton fields, and pecan groves.  Peach trees had long since dropped their fruit and the leaves are turning a reddish orange color and falling to the ground. In some fields, cotton was white across the land as far as the eye could see while other lands have been harvested and the plants cut down to stubble. Small cotton bolls rolled across the exposed soil protesting being left behind by the combines.

The pecan harvesters were out in their machinery scooping the nuts off the ground

Georgia pecan trees

preparing to take them to be processed and turned into pies and candies or to be bagged for the consumer to purchase. Summer harvest is over and the autumn harvest has begun.

The productive farmland we passed reminded me of how God’s Word is a seed planted into our lives. The sower sows the word, Jesus said, and the harvest comes from those seeds that do not get eaten up by birds or take root in shallow soil (Mark 4:13-20).

We can have this thirty, sixty, or hundredfold return by:

• Daily study
• Confession of the word over whatever circumstance we are up against
• Prayer

By following these planting steps we can be like a strong, sturdy plant able to withstand the winds and destructive forces of our enemy.

We reap from seeds

Fruitful harvest is never over. When peach season ends, the cotton and pecans are bursting forth waiting to be reaped. Our life harvest is never over, either. If we keep planting seeds we will continue to enjoy the richness of God’s fruit in our hearts garden.

God gives us the seeds but it is up to us to plant them in our ground and protect them from being uprooted. Seeing these fields showed me how much I need to be planting the right seeds into my life.

What does fall harvest remind you of?