The Messes We’ve Sown— Reckoning with the Harvest to Come

Summary

The provided text reflects on the inevitability of facing the consequences of our actions, emphasizing that both individual and collective behaviors will eventually yield results that must be confronted.

Abstract

The article "The Messes We’ve Sown— Reckoning with the Harvest to Come" delves into the biblical and philosophical concept of reaping what one sows, suggesting that every action or inaction has a consequence that will manifest in time. It paints a picture of life as a series of choices that lead to a harvest, whether it be one of our own making or the

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To Whom will you run for help? ~Isaiah 10:3

“As a man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.” ~Charles W. Chesnutt

People are forgetful — while the reckoning remembers our names. Faces engraved in the messes we’ve made. It gathers the bitter crop we forgot. We forget that the harvest of our labor will be ready, someday. You reap what you sow, And you reap what you don’t control from spreading when you decide not to take action against the stray seed planted by birds or carried on life’s winds. We reap what others sow, making their harvest our own. We grow strange forgotten fruits, adopted foreign roots, these strange fruits an inheritance from yesterday's seeds. We've put it away in our minds, forgotten until the smell of rotting reminds of past mistakes and choices, we've made. Through time, we somehow think we have tricked the reckoning. We decide we may not have to lay in the messes we made. But the messes we've sown — will be reaped they don't always wait for the gathering…

they come a’calling, wanting to be seen. Reckoning of realities we’d rather let die then to look at, eye-to-eye for fear of what the fruit might indicate about the state of our hearts and souls. Those old skeletons, we have neglected — It has been collecting the idle words we speak — we spoke. We didn't realize our words were seeds adding to the thorns and weeds — thickened overgrowth — Bitter seeds grow in the hearts of men waiting, waiting to be reckoned with. The messes we’ll reap we seek to keep hidden from others and ourselves. Yet time will uncover its roots — and we will be left wanting, and bare.