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Do we really need a harvest festival?
By Reina Free
All over the country by
now the wheat, barley, oats, rape, potatoes and so much more have been harvested.
I often do wonder if we realise how much hard labour, effort, care and concern
– and money – has to be put in first, before the food is on our table. Not
forgetting the wives and mothers keeping the ‘home fires’ burning, running
the homes, waiting for the men to come home for their meals, late, late, late
again. For tomorrow it might rain… too wet to harvest, plough or sow.In churches all over the country Harvest Thanksgivings are celebrated. Personally I am not so fond of these celebrations: thanksgiving to God should be every day anyway. The dear children ushered in, bringing their gifts to the altar – fruit, vegetables, tins of soup, biscuits, jam. Very sweet, very kind, very generous, cosy and comfortable.
But when I think of our local farmers, and I know a few of them, their lives are not so cosy and comfortable – far from it. I have heard some of their concerns: the amount of paperwork to be done when they come home, sometimes quite late. To have to cope with all kinds of useless rules and regulations, construed out of the minds of EU bureaucrats in Brussels, Strasbourg, London. The waste….the bottomless trough of expense accounts etc. etc. etc…
We piously pray Our Father give us this day our daily bread. I just heard this morning about the amount of food that is thrown out every day by many people in this country – an amount of £426 a year. And yet so many people in the world are starving, like in Darfur. Something has gone badly wrong.
Soon farmers will be ploughing again. Some fields are already done, hedgerows cut.
Dear Father God. Thank you for the harvest. Thank you for our farmers. Bless their families. Keep them safe. Keep them well. Amen.