Fallow

The slant of the morning light today, made me think of fall.

Greens fading, oranges blazing, leaves drying, the life around us slipping off branches and crunching under our feet.    The time and season is coming for plants to hibernate, to regenerate.

We know the seasons and we know the cycle so we do not fear the impending winter.  We prepare for it, we expect it, but we don’t fear it. In fact, the Creator perpetuates this cyclical pattern for the greater good of the earth.  It is necessary, it is the ebb that accompanies the flow.

Such a drastic change is coming and it appears that all we held onto has died- but it hasn’t.

Twenty-twenty: the year of falling branches and crunching leaves. As I meditated on this idea of fall, my conscience ran right into another similar word: fallow. 

The earth is in a fallow year of sorts.  We did not choose it, but here we are. 

In all our earnest production and yielding, striving and growing, we have forgotten the beauty and necessity of fallow times.

I read that fields are left fallow because it is a time to rest, to replenish the soil, to cease productivity for a greater season of productivity to come.

I wonder, am I willing to lie as fallow ground? 

If ever there was a time to reflect and reorientate, it is now.

If ever there was a time to make changes in what my heart is going hard after, it is now.

If ever there was a time to renew my relationship with Jesus, to be still in His love and affection, and revisit the source of all my doing, it is now.

Fallow does not mean forgotten. Fallow does not mean rejected.

May we enter into the peace He offers in this season. May we beckon this reduction as a time of replenishment and regeneration. May we allow the chaos of yielding and producing to die down under our feet as we wait on Him to restore all we’ve lost.