Dear Friends,

Spring is a distant memory, summer has come and gone, autumn has begun and winter is not too far away. The pattern of the year, with its four seasons, speaks to us of the pattern of life: birth and new growth in spring, increased vigour and maturity in summer, reaping the rewards of life through memories in autumn, and the slowing down of everything in winter. Each season has its own pleasures and challenges and we each experience them differently.

Here, in Scotland, we can never be sure when the seasons will change. Indeed, we can sometimes experience all four seasons in one day! This unpredictability can be somewhat problematic when it comes to planning when to celebrate the harvest, a difficulty multiplied in the 21st century when few people are actually involved in harvesting. Gone are the days when the school ‘Tattie Holidays’ saw youngsters swapping schoolrooms for tattie fields.

But the harvest is still vital. We only need to think back a few years, when the pandemic saw the supermarket shelves almost empty, to appreciate that the whole process of getting food is largely out of our hands. Thanks to a complex web of producers, processors, distributors and retailers, we are fortunate that we can go along to the shops, at anytime of year, and buy almost any food that takes our fancy. The danger of this is that we can lose sight of the fact that we are as reliant as our forebears, on the natural processes that create our food. But, ultimately, we are only able to eat by the Grace of God.

When we give thanks for the harvest, we are not only thanking God for our food, we are thanking Him for all the blessings He has showered us with, as the chorus of the well-loved hymn, ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’, goes:

All good gifts around us 

are sent from heaven above; 

then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord, 

for all His love.

There are many ways we can thank God for His good gifts, e.g. prayer, worship, obedience, etc. but, perhaps, the best way is to help others. In the Old Testament, God commanded His people,

‘When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God’ (Leviticus 22:23)

Today, the most practical way that those who are able we can do this is,

When packing our shopping bags in the supermarket, don’t pack it all, leave some in the Foodbank trolley for the poor.

Many blessings,

Carl