Hoorah!! It is harvest time again!! There you are, hurtling along the A9 in your car on some mission of huge importance, muttering venomously at cyclists in helmets shaped like wasps’ bottoms, inconsiderate enough to want a bit of your road (you of course hoping they can’t lip-read) and cursing that you’ve already been caught behind yet another camper van, supermarket wagon or log lorry.

Rounding a bend you come up behind the ponderous majesty of a slow-moving tractor and trailer. On closer inspection over the next ten minutes, you realise that it’s not a single tractor and trailer, but is actually a convoy of three tractors and two trailers, and the glory of the aforementioned ponderous majesty begins to lose it’s shine!

Hoorah. It’s harvest time again. And I’d bet that sitting in that queue of cars, most of you don’t start singing hymns, psalms and songs of everlasting thanks and praise to our great God for his generous provision, or bless the farmers or the shop and factory workers or thelorry drivers for the work they do to put food on our plates!

So here’s the challenge for harvest and beyond. If you get stuck behind a tractor or a combine or a plough or any mysteriously shaped implement or a delivery wagon or a log lorry, take it as an opportunity for reflection, for thanksgiving and for praise to the God who lies behind all of it and give us so much that we often take for granted.

So let us make a start but praying a rather lovely prayer for the harvest of God’s love which is ultimately what gives us the all the wonderful things that we enjoy from day to day.

Lord, your harvest is the harvest of love;
love sown in the hearts of people;
love that spreads out like the branches of a great tree
covering all who seek its shelter;
love that inspires and re-creates;
love that is planted in the weak and the weary, 
the sick and dying.

The harvest of your love 
is the life that reaches through
the weeds of sin and death
to the sunlight of resurrection.

Lord, nurture my days with your love,
water my soul with the dew of forgiveness,
that the harvest of my life might be your joy.

Frank Topping

Blessings
James