Posted on: 23rd October 2026

To paraphrase Forrest Gump…harvest at the Crypt is like a box of chocolates, we never know what we are going to get! To that end, it is very similar to an afternoon watching my football club (the oldest one in London…and if you don’t know, you can Google the answer!). It is joy and anxiety all mixed into one boiler pot of emotion. Joy at seeing the corridors slowly piling up with crates, boxes and bags; and the degree of anxiety that precedes that…for there is always a question that is often lingering deep in our hearts, is any harvest going to appear? Yet, by the grace of God and the generosity of so many people, the answer, despite our anxieties, is always the same and the boxes pile in and fill the corridors with the most welcome of trip hazards. 

As I have given thanks and prayed over the harvest this year, the same sense has kept coming back to me, which has been to give thanks for water. As a gardener and particularly a vegetable grower, this last summer has been one where the ongoing drought has brought into focus the fundamental need for water to grow anything at all. My harvest assemblies to local schools have focussed on this theme. Do you know how many glasses of water it takes to produce one loaf of bread? It isn’t the two you might think; it is four thousand! Yes, four thousand glasses of water to grow, harvest, process, produce, package and transport one solitary loaf of bread. Our dependency on water to produce every item of our food is beyond our imagining, yet at the same time, in amongst the marrow and tins of beans lined up in churches across the land, water seems to be forgotten as the last thing we give thanks for at harvest time. 

Whereas arguably it should be the first. If we think back to the beginnings of recorded life in Genesis, the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. So, we are left in no doubt about the fundamental and elemental nature of the simplest and yet paradoxically most complex basis of life. Water was there from the beginning and without it, nothing can grow and we cannot survive, which is a saltatory and pertinent thought, as we face the prospect that these drought conditions will continue and worsen in future years. It is also a call to prayer, so let us join together and pray to the Lord of the Harvest and give thanks…for water.