Have you ever taken part in a harvest?
Jamie and Char Hunt can now say they have.
The Nivacles in the Paraguayan village where Jamie and Char Hunt minister planted sesame as their cash crop this year. Each family has two to ten acres of sesame planted.
In order to spend time with the people to learn their culture and language, the Hunts wrote, “we have been helping them in their harvest. … We can testify that this is back-breaking work.”
The stalks are cut and gathered into sheaves. The sheaves dry for several weeks. When the pods are dry, they pop open and the sesame seed is shaken out onto plastic and gathered into bags.
“As we participated in the sesame harvest, we began to sense an urgency to their work,” the Hunts wrote. “If a field was not cut and harvested in time, the seed pods on the stalks would dry, pop open and then the tiny precious sesame seeds would fall to the ground and be lost forever. There was a small window of opportunity to harvest between the time the sesame was ripe and when the sesame seed would be lost.
“It seemed the larger the fields, the greater the urgency; it was truly a race against time as they pressed forward in the harvest before it was too late.
“We saw an older man hobbling in the field from morning till night; his arthritic knees could not deter him in the harvest for the need was just too urgent. Another young man had an … injury on his foot; still he pressed forward in the harvest for the field stretched out before him and he was afraid that soon it would be too late.”
Several of the Nivacles even received – and rejected — generous job offers outside their community. “Even the lure of money could not deter them from the harvest,” the Hunts wrote.
For me, that brings to light some things I never really thought about when reading Matthew 9:37-38 – things that would have been obvious to Jesus’ first century audience, who knew what it was like to bring in a harvest.
“The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.”
What about you? What do you see now that you hadn’t thought about?
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