We’ve come through a long season of drought. It started seven years ago, when I lost my job in January of 2009. We’ve never fully recovered from that blow, and since then we’ve taken even harder knocks.
The other day, it occurred to me that it had been a little over seven years since our hard season started, and it also occurred to me that most of the major droughts and famines mentioned in the Bible also lasted seven years. I sat down and did a quick scripture study to confirm this. And I realized that it does feel like something has changed. Like our personal drought is at an end, but fruit hasn’t suddenly started cropping up in the way of doors opening to new opportunities and our freelancing business being blessed with amazing success like I’d hoped.
My husband and I have been praying and standing on 2 Chronicles 7:14, which says, “If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (emphasis mine).
When things started getting hard, and then harder, and then still harder, instead of getting better, we both spent a lot of time in denial. “We’re good Christians,” we insisted. “Surely we’re not under discipline for anything.” But slowly, little by little, God began to reveal areas of our lives where we weren’t in step with His way of doing things. Little things, like not making Him and His Word a part of each and every day. Or worrying too much about what’s going on in the world instead of trusting Him. Or trying to fix everything myself, elevating my own plans and my own way of doing things above His.
Gradually over these seven years, we’ve both been learning to always put Him first, to trust more and more confidently, to surrender my own plans and yield more and more to what God’s doing. And while we’ve been in a season of hard — a season of financial drought and famine — God has turned this season into a spiritual feast.
As I was reflecting on all of this the other day, a word popped into my mind, and that word is fallow. I knew basically what that word meant, but even so, I looked up the definition:
Fallow (adj.) – (in farming land) plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility.
Wow, does that ever seem to describe where we’re at right now. We’ve been plowed under and we keep getting harrowed by the enemy–little attacks, little things that keep going wrong, clearly designed to wear us down, discourage us and derail us from the path God has us on–and it seems like we’re not being allowed yet to bear any fruit.
But then I remember the verse we’ve been standing on, and our entreaties to God to heal our land, and I understand that a fallow season is part of the healing process. It’s a season of rest and restoration, to prepare us to be more fruitful than ever.
Are you in a fallow season? If so, be encouraged, and lean into the healing work God’s doing in your life.
In love,
PS – Are you feeling weary after a long spiritual battle or a season of drought in your own life? Whatever the reason, sometimes life just wears us down. I’ve created a free printable of my Prayer for a Weary Woman — my free gift to you. Click the image below to download it.
PPS – Linking up this week at Holley Gerth’s Coffee For Your Heart, The Faith Barista’s #OneWordCoffee, and Faith Filled Friday at MissionalWomen.com.