Anyone who has ever worked with the land would probably tell you that you cannot harvest and plant at the same time. They would probably be right.
This past month my team spent time in a small farming community just outside of San Juan, Domican Republic. We helped repair their school and paint part of it, but that took less than 10% of our time there. The rest was spent making friends with the people who lived there and playing with their children. We had an older woman calling us her grandchildren by week 2. Some days it seemed like we ate lunch 3 times (just ask the girls who ate fried chicken foot). I took Chris for a ride on the back of the motorcycle I was driving (courtesy of our friend Osciris). The girls rode a horse for a little while one day, while kids laughed at the americanas on the horse. We were treated like old friends and told to sit down outside almost every house we came to, and were offered food or coffee, and would just talk with the people. We also helped harvest kidney beans a.k.a. “habichuela” with a few of the men in the community.
The sun can get pretty hot when you’re working the fields. To harvest habichuela you wait till it’s nice and ready, and then you pull each plant out of the ground, and put them in a big pile, which gets fed through a machine that separates the dried plant and the beans, and spit’s the beans out. Getting that pile together is the hard part. You go plant by plant in the field and pull it out of the ground, and clump them together roots facing up, so they are easy to grab hold of later and put them in a huge pile. One morning three of us got up before sunrise to make the walk out to the farm and help with the harvesting. After 3 and a half hours, my legs couldn’t take anymore and I had to stop, while the men from the town just kept on going like they were doing fine, some smoking cigarettes or cigars while they worked. It was an experience that helped give me some insight into what it is like to live on a farm and depend on the land for your sustenance. The first day we as a team helped with the harvesting, there were about 30 people out there helping, and the work seemed to fly by.
The second time, when there were three of us, there were only about 10 other people helping from the community and the work seemed to never end. This field was very weedy and sometimes it was hard to find the habichuela plants. It was hard work and there weren’t a whole lot of people.
While at the farm we did not experience people finding Christ and giving their lives to him. We didn’t harvest. I do believe that the Lord is preparing that place though. There are several believers there who have a passion for the Lord that can spread throughout that place. There seems to be conflicts/divisions among the community that the love of Christ can heal, but the people would have to let him in. At least one of the men there used to be involved in witchcraft, but has since left that behind. His son, Osciris, and his wife are strong believers, but he is not. He is probably the most gentle of the men with the kids and the most loving. There is a lot of potential in the community, and I believe the Lord is working there and preparing people’s hearts. I think that we helped “plant seeds” in the people’s hearts. Hopefully they saw the love of Jesus in us and heard us as we talked to them about him.
So in conclusion, we helped the people harvest beans, and I believe that he Lord used us to help him plant and grow in the people’s hearts. My goal was not to make the cheesiest analogy I could, but it seemed applicable. There are many parables in the Bible about farming, sowing, and harvesting and I believe he is the Lord of the harvest and that he is always working in men’s hearts, even though we may not see it. If you would like to, please pray for the people there, that they would come to know the love of Jesus, and that they would love each other the way he loves us.
Matthew 13: 1-43
Matthew 9:33-38
