These are harvest days. Beans roll golden. Wagons fill. Children ride with uncles, Grandpa, Dad, and Mama brings meals. We are a family, grateful and blessed to be.
I worked these fields in the spring, with hopes, expectations. We laid seeds into this bed of earth. We tended Mom V.’s bedside. Tender shoots leafed, plants flowered, the promise of pods and yield. Time did its work. Mom Voskamp soared, and we sang through tears. The aphids descended, gnawing late into the night. And now— yes, already—- comes the harvest, a season of life passed. It’s not like last year: these fields thirsted all summer. Thunderheads went north, south. The rain guage grew dusty. Less pods shell through the combine. Storage bins do not run over. We sing anyways.
We are His children, dust from this dust…. and we will trust. We are thankful for what is…. And we remember lessons learned last year, about the only harvest that really matters...
I run to Darryl with his lunch basket. He shakes his head, hollering over the tractor’s engine, “We’ve got about 30 minutes left and we think its coming fast. Not now. Later.” And he is gone in a cloud of dust.
No time. No time for greetings or food or sleep. Three brothers who have slept less than three hours in the last 48, they keep pressing against clouds on radar screens. They are racing to bring in the harvest until time trickles out and the storm beats down.
Moving back to the van with the meals, the wind turns, gusting cold. The sun that a few moments ago warmed the soil and our skin darkens with the billowing gray, the underbelly of the clouds pressing low. The two mammoth combines surge down the fields, ravenously consuming beans in a scramble against skies.
I see Darryl pointing, thinking he sees streamers of rain on the horizon. The trees are bending now in the rushing fury. Only acres remain…
Matt. 9:37-38
Originally posted October 2006
(*Photo: Levi coming to join Uncle John V. and Joshua as the pods shell on late summer days)
