Letter from the Editor
Harvest
Dear reader,
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is the way John
Keats describes autumn in his 1820 ode to that season. I don’t
quite know about mists, but we do often associate fall with
fruitfulness, with harvest, with abundance. The fall months
bring with them bursting cornucopias and pumpkins fat and
round as full moons, set up in grocery store entrances and on
neighborhood front steps.
It’s late autumn as I write this letter, but you, dear reader,
will see it published in the Spring 2020 issue. We as a staff
have spent this harvest season sowing rather than reaping.
Our newly created online team took a leap of faith with a
blog and a new platform. Our print team has worked hard
for this magazine, and now we hope to see the fruit of our
labors in the spring. And as students, we’re all familiar with
the feeling of investing time and energy into assignments and
projects that come to fruition painstakingly slowly. Haven’t
we all experienced this tension, whether we’re writing papers
or repeating experiments or campaigning for change? The
work is hard. The wait is long. The result is uncertain.
Whether we are Christian or not, we often feel like we sow,
only to reap nothing. We often wonder if our work here and
now means anything at all, or if everything is meaningless—a
chasing after the wind, as the writer of Eccelesiastes laments.
And for Christians, many of us wonder how we can work
towards the Kingdom of God and what that even means.
efforts don’t yield the kind of harvest we wanted, we can still
reap wisdom from our failures.
And the Christian, moreover, trusts that all work—no
matter how big or small, no matter in what field—will surely
contribute to the Kingdom of God. Not all the seeds we sow
will blossom in our lifetime, but the resurrection promises us
that what is sown will be raised imperishable, in power and
in glory. 2
We hope that these pages offer you a look at the ways we sow
and reap, harvest and hope. “Two Letters” addresses non-
Christians and Christians alike, acknowledging in humility
the ways the Church has failed and encouraging believers
to work towards justice and restoration. “How We Met” and
“Porcelain Butterfly” both show us another kind of sowing—
investing in relationships and in other people, particularly in
sharing the Gospel. And the poem “Through the Wilderness”
is searing in its honest portrayal of the pain and despair we
experience in our dry seasons, where growth and God both
seem distant.
Reader, in your hands, you hold what we have sown. We hope
that in reading, you will reap something of goodness in these
pages.
Yours truly,
Maybe it would be easier to give up. But the Apostle Paul
encourages us not to “grow weary of doing good, for in due
season we will reap, if we do not give up.” 1 Can we join Paul
in daring to believe that, somehow, no good we do goes to
waste? From experience, we all know that even when our best
1
Galatians 6:9, ESV
6 Spring 2020
Naomi Kim is a junior concentrating in English.
2
1 Corinthians 15:42-43