Don't rush

The harvest is ripe (Joel 3:13) 
Alison has done marvels with food the last few days. We've been a bit busy with Caleb's sponsored walk. It's been a lot of fun, taking in five local villages, and what feels like hundreds of hedge stiles and plank bridges, but, at an average pace of one mile an hour, time has been short for food preparation. 
Yesterday in particular there seemed to be nothing in the cupboard and no time to prepare it so I rashly suggested I might have some potatoes ready in the vegetable patch.
I can hear you groan from here. Of course they are not ready George, it's not even June. I think deep down I knew that but was desperate to pull my weight on planet family so I dug one rather large-leafed example with abandon. Sure enough a series of truly tiny tubers appeared above ground. The harvest was definitely not ripe.
I wonder how often in life we pick things before they are ripe. Certainly the old line about being promoted to your level of incompetence suggests it is so in business and education. In the church we are prone to give people a job on the PCC before they've even get over the threshold. There are endless books you can read on the discipline of waiting to help you, but I for one don't have the patience to read them. 
Today, our government is very much in that place of waiting for the right moment, of knowing when the harvest is ripe. If they act too soon then the killer virus will re-emerge. If they act too slow then our vital businesses will all go bankrupt. Great patience is needed, as well as great wisdom. I don't envy them the task.

A long walk through hot fields

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