The First Harvest at Davis Bend

In 1864, along a bend of the Mississippi River, formerly enslaved men and women walked rows of cotton and corn they had planted with their own hands — on land that had once belonged to Jefferson Davis himself. The Union Army had established Davis Bend as a freedmen's colony, and for the first time in their lives, these families were farming not for a master but for themselves.

Benjamin Montgomery, once enslaved on that very plantation, helped lead the community. By harvest time, they had brought in a remarkably profitable crop. The reproach of slavery — the auction block, the branding iron, the decades of being told they were less than human — was being rolled away from them.

But something else shifted in that season. The emergency rations from Union supply lines grew scarce. The daily provision that had sustained them through the upheaval of war gave way to something different: the fruit of their own cultivated ground. Both were gifts from the Almighty, but they looked and tasted entirely different.

This is the story of Gilgal. For forty years, God had fed Israel with manna — faithful, miraculous, daily. But when they finally ate the produce of Canaan, the manna stopped. God was not withdrawing His care. He was graduating His people into a new season of provision. The same hand that had rained bread from heaven now blessed the work of their hands in promised soil.

When God rolls away your reproach and brings you into new territory, do not be alarmed if yesterday's provision ceases. It means the harvest has begun.