The Harvest is Abundant

July 7, 2019

While in the Gospel Jesus invites us to look at how we are called to be disciples, as well as to always pray for more vocations and more laborers for the vineyard. It is the first part of the proclamation that should grab our attention.  “The harvest is abundant.”  That really gives us God’s perspective.  God sees the good that we do, sees the efforts we make, sees the potential and sees it as good.  When Jesus says the harvest is abundant we must ask ourselves, what does that mean, what does it look like?  To say it is abundant we have to go past the issues of food and hunger.  There is still hunger and starvation in the world.  To say the harvest is abundant is to go past the issue of homelessness.  There are still people in shelters as well as in mansions.  Yet Jesus says the harvest is abundant.

Faith, hope and charity or love remain and the greatest of these is love.  When Jesus speaks of the abundance of a harvest, He speaks of the depth of faith.  He sees, as we hear on every Ash Wednesday, what no one else sees.  The depth of love finds itself expressed in so many ways that never hit the headlines.  So many heroes who give hugs to the unwanted, bring smiles to the hardened of hearts and have an abundance of joy.  They tap the wellspring Jesus offered to the woman at the well.  Too often our mindset might be in the wrong place.  Many times we only see what isn’t, we see what went wrong, what should have happened, but didn’t.  When we dwell there, and it is easy to do so, we miss what did happen in a positive way.  When I go to hit a bucket of golf balls, I can dwell on my swing speed that is too fast or how the ball did not fly where I thought it would.  I can analyze over and over what I did wrong.  If I do that, not only do I steal the joy, but I also miss the action of being physically able to see a ball, strike it with a club manufactured for this purpose and recognize that there are people who are employed because I just landed it in the water never to see it again.  As a golfer, I try to look at one good thing that happens at each hole.  This allows me to leave the golf course with 18 positive thoughts.  When I break it down like this, there was an abundance of goodness that happened no matter what my score was.

The world does not see as God does; He sees us and sees abundance.  We are invited to find the abundance God has placed in the world.

May these days of summer see the harvest of abundance in our faith, hope and love.

Reverend  John J. Ouper