The fields are white

We are mid-October, and it is finally feeling like fall here in Northwest Georgia. My little vegetable garden is dried up except for a few green peppers that keep holding on, but the field behind our house is white. It’s not from snow—that would be very unusual for our neck of the woods — but from cotton bursting out of its seed pods like big kernels of popcorn.

I keep thinking about the verse Jesus said, in the old King James:

Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.

(John 4:34)

The field is ready, and the harvest will be soon.

The old timers around here in Sugar Valley view the cotton with mixed feelings, remembering the hot and backbreaking work of picking it by hand when they were young. Back in the 1940’s and 50’s, school here closed in mid-October so that everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, could help bring in the cotton crop. I’ve been told that the burrs cut your fingers and that the light fluffy cotton got very heavy by the time you made it to the end of the row with your full sack hanging over your shoulder.

Those days are gone and soon Kevin, our resident farmer, will be out with his huge harvester, sucking the cotton up and loading it into trucks. It will be sent to the cotton gin and then around the world to textile mills and other factories for clothes, carpet, and a million other uses.

Something about the cotton fields has touched a place inside me. Maybe it’s the history of cotton, not just here in Gordon County but all across the South. King Cotton ruled for hundreds of years, causing the need for strong, cheap labor, resulting in the terrible evil of the slave trade.

 But cotton also provided jobs for many, including my father who spent his career in textiles in North and South Carolina, supervising the weaving of cotton into blue denim cloth. Those rolls of cloth were sold to Levi’s and Wrangler to make the jeans of the 60’s and 70’s. The women in our area who sewed and sold chenille cotton bedspreads were the forerunners of the carpet industry that is the primary employer for Dalton, the Carpet Capitol of the world. The rugs, carpet and flooring in your house were probably made here.

I like knowing that instead of the corn or soybeans that Kevin has grown behind our house in past years, the cotton will be made into something useful, something that lasts, at least for a few years.

Jesus’ words about the harvest being ready come after he has a conversation with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. After their meeting, she believes that he is the promised Messiah and runs to tell her neighbors. While this verse is usually interpreted to mean that we need to be working to bring others to Christ, I think it can also mean that we need to be open within ourselves for what the Holy Spirit wants to teach us. Sometimes, like the Samaritan woman, we get it.

As I’ve watched the snowy blanket slowly cover the fields over the last 6 months, transforming the plants from brown to purple and now white as the cotton fibers push their way out, I have thought about my own growth. It seems to have taken a long time and has not been pretty. And while I don’t feel quite like a cotton ball that has finally popped out, I’m making progress.

The harvest doesn’t come until the work has been done. Kevin and his guys have worked the soil, planted, and fertilized for the past year. The rain and sun have come and now it’s time to reap the benefits.

How’s your harvest?