Looking out over our lush green lawn, you’d think the drought is over—right? The grass is growing like crazy and the summer flowers are showing off as though nothing happened. But if you live in the country as I do, you know this summer’s drought greatly impacted the farm crops. The harvest isn’t in yet but it’s a no-brainer that those weeks in June and July of little to no rain—coupled with intense daily heat and temperatures reaching close to 100 degrees for weeks—wreaked havoc on the corn and soybean crops. A friend from the Midwest reported that the bushel per acre count in his region was less than a third of a normal harvest!
Imagine if you had a job in which you only received one pay check a year. On the day that glorious payday arrives, your boss calls you in and invites you to sit down. He nervously hems and haws about the weather while drawing circles on his desk with his finger, finally looks you in the eye and says, “Look…things just didn’t develop here like we hoped. Your paycheck is going to be a third of what we’d promised.”
Tough stuff—right? Yet, that’s exactly how this year is panning out for our farmers. They could only sit back and watch it happen, helpless to do anything to alter its course. It’s still too early to accurately calculate how those historic six to eight weeks of severe weather will impact our farmers. I know this, it will be talked about for decades as the drought of 2012.
Maybe you’ve never considered the difference between your lawn and a farmer’s corn crop. You see, a corn crop only has one growing cycle, whereas grass has an renewable growing cycle. As long as it hasn’t been uprooted or poisoned, grass will always respond to warm sunshine and rain and regenerate itself. However, farm crops like corn, wheat and soybeans do not. They have only a tiny window of opportunity in which to send down their roots, absorb the nutrients from the ground, and synthesize the energy from the sun in order to present their farmer with a single glorious reward. It lives to produce one crop and dies. If the circumstances of life close the window on that one opportunity, it never returns.
The older I get the more I’m aware of the brevity of our lives. When we’re young, it’s nearly impossible to consider our lives in terms of seasons or windows of opportunity. We feel invincible because life seems to offer limitless possibilities. It’s ironic that we only seem to grow wiser when we get older and those windows of opportunity have passed.
One of God’s values is to redeem the time. That simply means to make the most of every moment. Our lives are designed to produce one crop only. God has ordained that we have one life to live and then comes the harvest. Jesus said we will be known by the fruit we bear, and he reminded us that the harvest for our crop comes in the form of being judged by our Savior. I’m not trying to scare the bejeebers out of you—I’m simply trying to lovingly remind you that we must soak up the rain when it falls on us. We must seize the opportunity to produce a crop that pleases our Heavenly Father. Consider today how you might grow in His favor by your acts of kindness while expressing an attitude of gratitude and patient cooperation with whatever He rains down on you.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” Matthew 13:23
Lord, please forgive me for not redeeming the time more effectively. Help me to experience the sheer joy of walking in fellowship and obedience to you and your Word. Amen.