It’s a dangerous business going out of your door. You step into the Road, and, if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. –Bilbo Baggins
The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Go! I am sending you… –Jesus
Rebekah has been reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein to me as we drive along the Missouri roadways visiting churches and speaking about Mexico. It’s a wonderful thing, hearing my daughter read what to me is a classic piece of literature. It is classic because, even decades after it was written, its message can still be heard and applied.
The story is basically about Hobbits, small and self-sufficient creatures, sheltered from the world, suspicious of strangers, with eyes that look no further than their bit of earth beyond their little holes. They had heard rumors of what went on outside their borders, but their small existence kept them from comprehending the ramifications of those strange and foreign goings on in their day to day lives. Until, one day, a not so adventurous Hobbit named Bilbo got swept off of his feet into an adventure. Suddenly, the hope of the world depended on this small, shy, and unassuming lot.
The disciples too had not seemed to seek out the adventure that they found themselves in as followers of Jesus. Most of them were outsiders, blue-collar workers more concerned with the ebb and flow of the Sea of Galilee than of the rise and fall of the religious “powers that were” in Jerusalem to the south. They busied themselves in their own routine of catching fish or collecting taxes, perhaps much like the Hobbits, without even categories to speak about saving the world. That is until Jesus came, and with the words, “Follow me,” they too were swept off of their feet, suddenly at the center of God’s plan to redeem mankind.
They had, no doubt, seen the harvest field before, but not as Jesus had shown it to them. It was a harvest, not of grain, but of souls. A common scene was given new meaning, and a common need, that of workers to bring in the harvest, was given new importance.
So Jesus called them, not to mobilization, but to prayer. However, as they prayed, they found that the answer was to be found within their own small band. The appeal to pray was not an impersonal one. It was not a way to “pass the buck.” It was a way to hear the cry of God saying, ” Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” and to respond as Isaiah, “Here am I. Send me,” or as the disciples with their feet as Jesus said, “Go! I am sending you…”
Let’s bring this, then, out of the realm of fantasy and out of the distant past to where we go about our daily lives. We wake. We work. We eat. We sleep. We certainly hear and see more than the Hobbits or the disciples, but too often those impersonal rumors on talk radio or the digital images on the screen seem incapable of grabbing us, seemingly impotent at their attempts to move us.
Except when we pray, and, all of a sudden, what seemed so far away has reached out and touched our hearts, and we hear the cry, “Who will go?” and we find ourselves, in our own small voice responding as Frodo the Hobbit before the leaders at the Council of Elrond, “I will (go), though I do not know the way.”
It is a dangerous business, therefore, to pray, but what more exciting business could you ever hope to aspire to?
