Reap What You Sow
The Law of the Harvest and Self-Marketing
“You will reap
that which ye sow”
Is a phrase of hope
for those who know
In this transmission, we urge you to reap the benefits of the all the work you do. A lifelong lived identity is always an exercise in self-marketing and the best form of self-marketing is delight.
Reap What You Sow
This old phrase (Galatians 6), often called the law of the harvest, is widely misunderstood. It is usually taken to mean something like karma or cause and effect. Do good to get good.
Which is all true, but the law has another layer. Reaping is itself work. Doing something good like sowing the ground and growing the crop doesn’t automatically fill the bins with a bumper harvest. The harvest has to be harvested. The field has to be reaped.
The lesson for you is that you must reap. This can be as simple as making sure your people and you are kept aware of the good you have. “Isn’t it great to live in our family?” “You know, most companies just aren’t like this.” It also means that when reach the stage of getting the benefits you have worked for, you still need to be creative, you still need to work. The benefits are outsized.
A trip to the mountains to pick bushels of apples is work.
Cutting them up for an apple crisp and letting your kids talk you into making enough apple crisp to have it for breakfast all week and oh also a pie, that is also work, but it is work that pays for everything that came before.
Put in just the tiniest work in storage, picking through the apples to take out the most bad ones, and you can do it next week and next week and by now six weeks running. The children smirk at breakfast.
Beauty is a Rich Harvest
One of the highest ROI forms of reaping is beauty. Presentation and aesthetics usually don’t require much additional work but enhance the lived experience greatly.
It’s a lot of work to grow and harvest tomatoes. It’s a lot of work to pick them in a rush before the first killing frost. It’s a lot of work to spread them out and pick through them. But it is a strong delight to eat them in a salad in December, every mouthful is a pat on the back, and if you take just a little extra time to put them out where you can see them, every time you walk past you reap a bit more harvest.
Sow, reap, feast.
You should be happy.