The Harvest Home by William A. Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Aug 31, 1905

The Harvest Home

By William A. Spicer

DON’T think that our missionaries in the far-away fields are homesick for native land. They are facing homeward the other way. They are homesick for the heavenly home that lies beyond the harvest of the whitening fields.

Old memories and associations are with them still. None of the dear hearts and ties of home are forgotten. But wherever their feet press, they are in the world that God loves. And their fields, with all the burdens and cares and privations, have grown into the heart and life until the hardest thought of all is that of separation from the beloved work.

I believe Elder Anderson will pardon a quotation from a personal paragraph in his last letter, sent off from the boat at Vancouver:—

I am glad to be off again for China. My visit to the States has been pleasant, and I think profitable, but it will be a glad day when I get back to my work. I feel much encouraged by the many assurances of deep interest and sympathy on the part of our people in the home land. I am sure China will neither be forgotten nor neglected.

Depend upon it, brethren and sisters who pray for missions, the hearts of our missionaries are true to their fields. They have set their faces like a flint to press the line of advance to the finish. Until the Lord comes, that place is home which most needs the service the worker can render.

I venture to say that the most homesick hearts are some who on account of health or exigencies of the work are held back from needy fields whose cry they ever hear. Here is a little poem voicing this longing for the frontier field of service, which some “on furlough” will most appreciate:—

“Let me go back! I am homesick For the land of my love and toil, Though I thrill at sight of my native hills, The touch of my native soil. Thank God for the dear home country, Unconquered and free and grand! But the far-off shores of the East, for me, Are the shores of the promised land.

“My brain is dazed and wearied With the New World’s stress and strife, With the race for money and place and power, And the whirl of the nation’s life. Let me go back! Such pleasures And pains are not for me; But O! for a share in the harvest home Of the fields beyond the sea!

“For there are my chosen people, And that is my place to fill, To spend the last of my life and strength In doing my Master’s will. Let me go back! ’Tis nothing To suffer and do and dare; For the Lord has faithfully kept his word, He is ‘with me alway’ there!”

O, ’tis a grand thing to work for God in such a needy world as this, and at such a time as this, when the harvest home is so soon to be sung.

W. A. S.