This week on The Sunday Sermon, I want to tell you about a magazine that changed my life a little bit back when I was a kid. And it’s a story I’ve told a couple of times here on the site.
It was the January 2000 issue of Tips & Tricks, one of my all-time favorite magazines that wasn’t wrestling related. I was thirteen years old, standing in the magazine aisle at the supermarket the way kids did back then when there was nothing else to do and you were waiting for your parents to finish shopping. Most of what was in that issue I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. But somewhere in the middle of it was a four page strategy guide for a game called Harvest Moon 64, and I read that thing so many times over the next year that I probably still have parts of it memorized. In fact, I still have the magazine and will include a picture of it.
The game had come out in December 1999 and I couldn’t find it anywhere. This was before Amazon, before digital storefronts, before you could just pull out your phone and have something delivered by Thursday. Or order it digitally and start playing right then. If a game wasn’t on the shelf at the local Walmart or Toys R Us, it might as well have not existed. Harvest Moon 64 was niche enough that it never seemed to be on the shelf anywhere near me, not even Movie Gallery. So I just kept going back to that magazine guide and thinking about it.
Late November 2000, my parents drove to the Toys R Us in the neighboring state to let me pick out some Christmas presents. I wasn’t expecting much that I didn’t already know about. And sitting on the shelf, one copy, was Harvest Moon 64. I had it in my hands before I fully processed what I was looking at.
Christmas morning I had several new games, including WWF No Mercy, which by all rights should have been the one I couldn’t put down. Instead I put in Harvest Moon 64 first and didn’t come up for air for what felt like the rest of the year. I ended up with a few hundred hours in that game, which for a kid in the early 2000s without any kind of tracking software is really saying something. It was my favorite game for years. Nothing else came close until Red Dead Redemption showed up in 2010 and rearranged my list entirely.
I’ve thought a lot over the years about why that game grabbed me the way it did. It isn’t a complicated game. You inherit your grandfather’s farm. You have three years to build it into something worth passing on. You plant crops, raise animals, build relationships with the people in town, and the seasons turn whether you’re ready for them or not. Spring gives way to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter, and then it starts again. The loop is simple and the graphics were charming even then and the music was exactly the kind of thing that buries itself in your brain and stays there for twenty-five years.
But none of that fully explains the pull of it. The mechanics are thin by modern standards. There have been plenty of better farming games since, including Stardew Valley which is the definitive version of this genre and which I love enormously. And yet Harvest Moon 64 is the one that got there first for me, and the one that still feels like home in a way none of the others quite match.
I think the answer is in Ecclesiastes 3.
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build.”
The passage goes on from there, cycling through contrasting pairs (weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, scattering stones and gathering them). Most people know it from the Byrds song, which lifted the words almost wholesale and turned them into one of the most recognizable pieces of music of the twentieth century. But the original is more interesting than the song, because the song strips out the theology and what’s left is just a list of opposites. The full passage in context is something different. It is a claim that time itself has a shape, that the rhythm of things is not random, that there is a Maker who built seasons into the fabric of the world on purpose.
Harvest Moon 64 is the most literal video game illustration of that passage I have ever encountered.
The game runs on seasons, and each one has its own rhythm and its own demands. Spring has its crops — turnips, potatoes, strawberries — that won’t survive the heat of summer. Summer has its own entirely different harvest waiting if you planted right when the calendar turned. Fall brings a third wave, a third set of things to tend and gather before the cold comes. And then winter arrives and the fields go quiet and there is nothing to plant and nothing to harvest and the game essentially tells you to stop and breathe for a while. Go talk to the people in town. Build the relationships you were too busy for when the soil needed you every morning. Winter in Harvest Moon 64 is not failure. It is the season that makes the next spring possible. You cannot override any of it. You cannot will summer to linger because your crops weren’t ready. The calendar turns at its own pace and your job is to be ready for whatever season is coming, to have done the work of the current one well enough that the next one doesn’t ruin you.
I was fourteen years old when I first played this game and I didn’t have a theological framework for why it felt so right. I just knew that there was something satisfying about working a field, watching seeds become crops, watching the year turn. I grew up in a house where we had a garden, where my mom took seriously the idea that you could grow things yourself and eat what you grew. Harvest Moon 64 was the first game that reached into that part of my life and said yes, this is worth something. The patience and the rhythm and the seasonal discipline of farming; that’s not just a way to survive. That is a way of being in the world that has something true in it.
Ecclesiastes is the most honest book in the Bible in a certain sense. It doesn’t promise that the seasons will always be kind. It doesn’t say your harvest will be plentiful or that the relationships you build will turn out the way you hope. It says that time has a structure, that every season comes in its turn, and that the best thing a person can do is understand that structure well enough to live inside it wisely. The preacher in Ecclesiastes has tried everything else and found it empty. What he comes back to, at the end of his winding and sometimes dark meditation on the nature of human life, is something simple: fear God, keep his commandments, do the work in front of you, and trust the rhythm of things to be what it is.
That’s Harvest Moon 64. You can’t rush the seasons. You can’t skip the winter. You plant in spring because spring has its crops, and you harvest them before summer arrives with entirely different ones demanding your attention, and fall brings its own harvest before the cold shuts everything down and winter asks you to just be still for a while. And then you do it again, and you do it better, and the farm grows because you stayed in rhythm with it rather than fighting the calendar.
I am a real gardener (at least I try to be, certainly not an expert), not just a gaming one. Every spring I go out into my backyard and put things in the ground, and every summer and fall I harvest what I planted, and every winter I make notes about what worked and what didn’t and what I want to try next year. That rhythm has been part of my life for quite awhile now. And when I think about where I first understood it as something worth understanding, not just something my parents did, I keep coming back to a fourteen year old kid on Christmas morning putting a cartridge into an N64 and watching a little character walk out onto a neglected field and start to work.
There is a time to plant and a time to uproot. There is a time for everything. Somebody built that into the world. I’m grateful He did.
See you next Sunday when we go back to the Wild West.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at our Vortex Effect forums.
