Dear Friends,

 

Driving down the A 38 today on the way to Wells, my attention was seized, for one moment, by a vivid splash of gold on the right-hand side; on the way back I paid it closer attention. It was, as I had thought, a field of perfect sunflowers – huge, bright golden-yellow blooms, their faces turned towards the afternoon sunshine. I felt like stopping the car and bursting in to the field, just to be among them. I’d been disappointed recently in France, to find that the sunflowers there were over – just sad brown faces being left to dry out in the sun until their seeds could be harvested; so to find glorious sunflowers in North Somerset was an unexpected delight.

 

It is, of course, harvest-time, and when you read this we shall be busy preparing for our harvest supper and for the harvest festival services on the Sunday (hope to see you there – Wraxall at 10.30, and Failand at 6; all farmers and growers especially welcome!). Most of the time, our harvests are reasonably predictable, give or take variable weather conditions. This year, owing to the lack of water, our courgettes were all giant, thick-skinned marrows overnight, it seemed.  Sadly, for some of the countries in Southern Africa, harvests this year are likely to be especially poor, so we should expect to dig deeply into our pockets to support those people – and to remember how fortunate we are.

But to find something unexpected, like sunflowers in Somerset, was a bonus. It’s the surprise harvests that are especially rewarding – such as when an interesting flower appears, by self-seeding, in the garden.

 

Harvest-time is a good occasion to think about the harvest of our lives – what we have sown, what we have, or hope, to reap, and how we might expect to get the best yield from the small-holdings we call our lives. Again, like the crops in the fields, it’s often fairly predictable - but there are sometimes wonderful surprises.

Take the film, Billy Elliot, for example: the heart-warming story of the boy from a down-at-heel mining community up north, who was discovered to have an amazing ability to dance – and against all the odds, was finally accepted for training with the Royal Ballet. I think that what made that story so moving and powerful was that no-one expected a genius like that to emerge from the back-streets where Billy Elliot was raised. There seemed no hope that his talent could ever come to anything -  it could easily have petered out, for lack of encouragement. But he was encouraged, and he did blossom, and hope triumphed over experience.

 

Those working in education in deprived areas face a huge battle to overcome the stigma of ‘sink schools’. A truly gifted teacher is the one who glimpses the potential in a child, and works to encourage and develop it. But it’s not only in such situations as those that many harvests fail to materialise. How often have you thought about yourself, ‘well, maybe I’m not up to this’, or ‘perhaps I don’t have the time’, or ‘perhaps another year…?’  or ‘I could never do what he/she does’. How sad. Remember those poignant lines from Grey’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard:

 

            ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen;

            and waste its sweetness on the desert air…’

 

So what unused talents are quietly going to seed in Wraxall and Failand?

Think of some of the parables Jesus told: the parable of the sower, in which so many of the seeds which were sown failed to germinate, because they were not properly nurtured; or the parable of the talents, in which those who had failed to make the most of the opportunities they had been given were called to account for their lack of initiative…..

 

What unexpected harvest could there be in your life? Perhaps joining a new group, offering a service to someone,  developing an interest or talent; maybe even deepening your faith through prayer or coming along to church more often….   The Church has quite a way of

 

 

developing hidden potential in people.  You, too, could – as it were – be like those surprise sunflowers blooming in North Somerset!

I shall be watching for new shoots with interest……

 

With love,

Rosey