“The Law of the Harvest”
By Lloyd Newel

 September 26, 2004

As our calendars turn to autumn, nature’s grand finale of seasons dresses up around us. On many mountainsides and hills, the robes of summer’s green have given way to quilts of red, orange, yellow, and amber. Overhead, autumn shines down on everyone as the harvest moon fills the sky with its singular brilliance. Soon winter will come, and with it shorter days, frosty mornings, trees stripped of their foliage, quiet skies, and rest for the farmers’ fields—for a season.

What does fall bring to our lives after so many sun-drenched days? A backdrop of rich new colors; fallen leaves that pile up on lawns and crunch underfoot; a new school year for students; festivals, fairs, and football games; patches of pumpkins and hay stacked in the barn.

We see evidence of the law of the harvest all around us: “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”¹ It has been so since the beginning of time. We must plant a seed to watch the sprouting, nurture the growth, then face the scorching sun, wind, floods, and droughts before we gather in the harvest. Then, only then, do we reap autumn’s glory.

Before we know it, spring will emerge from the gray of winter and push forward the cycle of the seasons. Like the farmers’ fields, our souls must be tended and nourished, time and again. While hardship and happiness, light and darkness, pain and promise circle around us, we can sow a hearty temperament, cultivate sheer resilience, and find time at the end or beginning of the day to tend the furrows of our souls. And like the harvest we gathered from the dappled countryside, we will reap a bounty of faith, discipline, virtue, industry, and goodwill.

In ancient days, the “earth was once a garden place, with all her glories common.” The “land was good and greatly blest,” and that “glorious bloom” surrounds us still with promise of an even greater harvest. We sing “hosanna to such days to come”²—days of renewal, hope, and plenty for both the soil and the soul, when we will reap the blessings of what we sow.

1. Galatians 6:7.
2. William W. Phelps, “Adam-ondi-Ahman,” Hymns, no. 49.