Garden Harvest

Fall is my favorite time of year.  Pops of color are peaking out in the underbrush and the trees of northern Minnesota.  Sheets and blankets cover gardens through the night.    There is nothing that fills my soul like the wonder of nature.  The changes always remind me that “for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven.”  Today, also, would be my dad’s 99th birthday if he were still alive.  It is the bookend to my time of contemplating of grief and a fitting day to consider the wonders of God, the great gardener.

I have read a couple of books in the last month that  have used seasons of nature as metaphors for spiritual growth and aging.  Rather than seeing seasons in life as chronological, (childhood - teens = spring, young - mid adult = summer, middle age - elderly = autumn, frail elderly = winter)  -  the spiritual seasons of our inner lives are more intertwined and know no time frame.  There are dry spells and barrenness but there are also times of fresh springs and fertile growth.  They can occur at any age. 

Authors, Rachel Callahan and Rea McDonnell, in the book, Harvest Us Home, elaborate on age 50 and beyond as a “season of Jubilee.”  In the biblical tradition, the hallowed fiftieth year was a time when Israel was to set captives free, return to one’s homeland, recover and reclaim one’s roots and family. It was also a time when the land was to lay fallow, to rest. ( Leviticus 25) The “jubilee season” of 50 and beyond is not a time when we are unproductive but that the focus is not on what we can do but on what God, the good gardener, has done and will do in our lives.  It is a season to be more focused on tending - tending by God and tending ourselves.  

“As we age, we may experience not only the comfort of the gentle rains and breezes of the Spirit, but the slashing torrents of storms that break branches and scatter fruits.  We may not only receive the sweet sunshine of Christ, but we may become parched and need pruning as we age.  We may need another round of fertilizing.  As Paul writes:  ‘...only God gives the growth.  The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose...and we, we are God’s field.” (I Corinthians 3:7,9)  What we suffer will strengthen our roots.  Rooted and planted as we are in Christ, in God the ground of our being, we cannot be uprooted.  No matter how old we are, we can be transformed and conformed to Christ.  And in the end we will be harvested by our gardening God.” (pg. 63)

The fall harvest, is a wonderful time to give thanks for all God has done and for the season of new growth that is yet to be.