Br. Jack Crowley

Matthew 9:35—10:1, 5-8

The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. I’ve probably heard this sentence a few thousand times in my life. The truth is I’ve never known if it is good news or bad news. It always feels like both.

One of the best and worst parts of being a human being is labor. We labor with our hands and minds, we labor with God, we labor with one another, and we do the emotional labor of our lives as best we can. The best part of all that is we all have opportunities to do good work in our lives. The worst part is that something always gets in the way. Our labor is always limited by some obstacle, and is never as ideal as we first thought it would be. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

The good news is that Jesus knows our human nature. Jesus knows we have this drive within us for labor. Jesus knows when we look at the woes of the world, we are often filled with compassion and want to do something. We want to labor for a better world.

Jesus also knows when we look inside ourselves and see what we need to work on, we are again filled with that drive to labor. We are ready to work on our ourselves and labor towards being a better servant of God. This drive is beautiful and is something to hold on to.

Jesus also knows that we always run into something. We can be honest and say that our labors are never totally smooth. There’s always some friction, there are always things that never go according to plan, and we are always bound by the limitations of our own human bodies. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

Much of our life is spent dancing between serving God and staying sane. It is a delicate dance, a labor of love, a mixture of work and play, and it never ends. The harvest is plentiful. There is so much to do and an eternity to get it done.

We pray and work our lives as best we can, most often in silence, most often when no one is looking. Most of what we pray is between us and God. Keep working on that prayer.