This month we were assigned to live in a Thai village three hours outside of the closest city on the border of Burma. We live with host families and were asked to help harvest their rice fields. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

After one day of harvesting a small, small portion of their rice fields, I will NEVER look at a simple piece of rice the same.

Harvesting rice in America is one thing. It might involve a large combine or maybe a milling machine. But harvesting rice in a Thai village looked a little more like getting dressed head to toe in hot clothes — thick pants, two layers of socks (one so leeches don’t get through), one T-shirt, one oversized mens’ button up shirt, optional neck scarf, and one large rice hat. Once dressed you walk about 15 minutes through the village to arrive at the rice fields. After you slip on some work gloves that are more like poorly knit mittens, you grab a rice hook, which looks like something out of a slasher movie, then you head out to your section of the field.

The repetitive action of hooking a clump of rice stalks and slashing through it with your rice hook, then placing it in stacks continues on and on for hours. The amount of cut stalks numbers over millions, the amount of cut stacks numbers over thousands, the amount of workers slashing through this section is over 25 on any given day, the amount of sections numbers over hundreds.

This has been one day. There are still more steps to be done to this rice. This has just been the cutting stage.

I will never look at one piece of rice the same ever again.

See, as we are hooking, clumping, slashing, and stacking, the whole time the rice seed is clinging to the stalk by what seems like a thread. The slightest bump will knock the rice seed to the ground, which is lost in this rice field to be left for the animals instead of eaten by the villagers.

However, all this work and precision never stops these villagers from planting year after year and harvesting year after year. I can look at just one little grain and think about all the work that went into that ONE piece of rice. Maybe that is what the villagers see. They see that each piece of rice is valuable for feeding their families or being weighed for an income to live off of.

Here is where I see Christ. Christ sees that one piece of rice and all that work that went into it and still will never stop planting or harvesting. Christ sees us that way.

Jesus pursues our hearts in the same way those villagers pursue that one rice seed to be harvested. Jesus does not see us as a whole church or a group of people to love or speak to. He sees us individually — he wants to speak to just us and love just us.

The rice goes through quite a journey to get to your dinner plate. I have only seen one of the many, many steps that each rice grain passes through before it is made complete as a dinner for you and your family. But isn’t it true how we do the same thing? We go through many steps to become the men and women God has created us to be. We go through many ups and downs in life, but just like the villagers harvesting, Jesus never leaves us. He always pursues us to get all the way to the end. Jesus desires us to be the finished product. He desires our hearts to be aligned with his heart. He desires us to go along this journey with him so that we may be exactly what we were meant to be.

Rice field to dinner table. Christ is pursuing each one of us to be in a love relationship with him to become the people God created us to be.

I’ve been reading verses about harvesting as we enter into this time of rice harvesting as well as harvesting people for Christ. Join with us in prayer as we are seeing harvesting in a new light. Jesus is pursuing the people of this village, as well as the people of my life. May we each see Christ’s hand in this journey and cling to him like the rice seed clings to the rice stalk.

Matthew 9:37-38 “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Kate Nixon