By Gary Miller

Ever since I can remember deer hunting, I have dreaded July and August. Not because deer season is not here yet but because it will soon be.

And if I'm going to be ready for the cooler mornings of September and the colder days of October and November, I have to force myself into the heat of summer in order to shoot my bow, put out my cameras, and hang tree stands. For the past several weeks the temperatures around here have been in the 90s with humidity hovering around insanity. I mow my grass 30 minutes before dark and weed eat the next morning at daylight. Every other hour is sweltering.

If I do have to work outside during the day, I usually do so in short increments in order to keep me from dying of heat stroke! Have I made my point? Yet, I know if I'm going to be able to make an accurate shot, I need to be shooting my bow every day no matter what weather I’m faced with. I’ll do it but I don’t have to like it.

It really is amazing to me that just about everything in life points to one unchangeable principle – you hardly every reap in the same season as you sow. In fact, the term itself has been hijacked from the farmer. He knows, like none other, that truth. I imagine it has given him not only wisdom in other areas but patience in them as well. It also has given him a deep awareness of the uncontrollable period between those two seasons where he neither reaps nor sows but simply trusts. This is the longest season. It is the one that seems to have the most inactivity. It is definitely the one that moves the work of reaping from the hand to the heart and from an aching back to a bended knee.

The lesson to be learned in the principle of reaping and sowing is not only that we need to be careful as to what we sow but it is to remember that none of our work or our harvest, or our successes, can come without a season where God waters the seeds we have planted. It is and always has been His way of saying that our life’s work is a partnership with Him and that sometimes our job is to put our hand on the plow of trust and let God do the work that only He can do.

Gary Miller can be reached via e-mail at gary@outdoortruths.org.