His Harvest
The wheat harvest is a part of many a young person’s life if he or she is from rural southwest Oklahoma. A means of summer employment for just a few months as the harvest makes its way north startin’ in Texas and Oklahoma and headed for the Dakotas or Montana. Growin’ up on along the harvest trail, I carry many good memories of those days. Most of the folks we cut for are still friends today! And many of those wheat farmers also ran a good number of cows and ranchin’ was a way of life for them.We cut for people like the Hitch family out in the Oklahoma panhandle and others along the way that depended on the grain production as well as their calf crops. We went places Louis L’amour would write about in his western novels. We were all over western Kansas , eastern Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and would end up fifty miles north of Great Falls, Montana back in the 1960’s.
My Granddads on both sides of the family made the harvest. In the early days, folks use to drag a threshing machine all the way north. And then there was the combine. The first models were mostly pull-type. They just drove the tractors north. Occasionally, you still see a grain cart tractor being roaded to the next stop because they don’t have time to make the extra haul. The combines have to get rolling! Somewhere, we have a few old pictures with combines being loaded on the back of Studebaker trucks and headed north. In the beginning, they didn’t take the headers off of the combine. They weren’t all that wide anyhow. Today, a forty foot grain header for a combine cost more than the whole combine, truck, and all used to cost just fifty years ago. Wheat cutting went for three bucks back then. Wheat was from
three to five dollars a bushel, sort of like now. It’s tough to make a profit - year in and year out.
It’s tough for the wheat farmer and it’s tough for the harvester. I remember how important it was to get everything and not leave any “flags” waving in the field. Nowadays, there’s a thing called gps. It’ll take a full swath and rarely ever leave a flag behind. And the grain trucks are much different today. You can’t tell the difference between the truck arriving at the elevator from the field and the semis loading out to take to a grain terminal down the line. The combines today couldn’t even unload their whole bin on into the grain bed of one of those ole’ Studebakers that used to make many a trip to the elevator.
And boy howdy, when the moisture comes down and the machines start rolling, all the trucks seem to arrive at the elevator at the same time! And this creates lines which eventually leads to full combines sitting at the edge of the field just waiting for a truck to get back so they can go back to the elevator and wait again!
Are you ready for the harvest? Jesus calls the believer to be tending to the harvest. We are to reach the people of all backgrounds and share the love of Christ with all people. Jesus said, in John 4:35, …Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest. I pray everyone stay safe as we finish up the harvest of grain. Let us be diligent in the task before us of the harvest of souls for His kingdom! Jesus said in Matt 28:19-20, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (nasb) Choose Jesus, choose life and let your light shine! And find a Bible believin’ church where you “fit in” and know, grow, and follow Christ! Tell others! See y’all at church and keep PRAYIN’ for HIS HARVEST! Pray for the rain! Amen!