I confess I am not the best at keeping up with blogs. "The Harvester's Field" is my second attempt to create and maintain a blog. I mostly feel discouraged to write because I feel I have no readers besides my mother and my wife. Now I understand that this is probably due to my lack of marketing, so I'll try to improve in this area. I'll start off by catching up with this past summer. I was invited to go work in Miami, FL (pictured above), with a youth group called J4L ("Jesus For Life"). I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and I was convinced that God had called Tiffany and I to live and work in Miami. Now this wasn't the first time this had happened. It seems like every time I visit a large metropolis, I feel like God is calling me to live there and work with the lost of that area. It happened when I visited in Denver, CO, last spring, and it happened when Tiffany and I went to Atlanta, GA, after leaving Miami.
In Acts 16, Luke is talking about all the places to which they had been traveling and what they had been doing in those places. When, then, he says in verses 9-10:
And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying "Come over to Macedonia and help us." And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them.
I believe God speaks to us today, and I believe he speaks to me and to you. I believe God is stirring up his spirit within me every time I visit a city and feel the desire to move there. I believe God recognizes those cities as "great cities." In Jonah 1:2 God calls Nineveh a "great city." At the end of the same book (Jonah 4:11) we learn that God thinks that the city is not only great because of the amount of people there but because of the sin in that city. Large cities are fields ripe for harvest, farms made of concrete where God has planted his seed throughout time and now workers are needed to come harvest the fields. There is so much work to be done, yet very few workers decide to go to them. I feel blessed to understand God's calling for me. Surrendering myself to be led by the Spirit of God himself has brought me insight into God and his mission in my life.
My prayer is that you may surrender to the Spirit of God within you to guide and lead you. Listen to where it leads your heart. Whether it be large "concrete farms" or small country towns with real farms, may you listen to who God wants you to preach the Gospel to. The "farm" God might need you to work in might not be a "concrete farm," but God has a field somewhere that needs to be harvested, and he needs you there to harvest it. The fields are ripe, ready for harvest.
Blessings,
Daniel Coutinho
