Two Seasons Of Nothing Sown

He goes down to the gate most mornings and he does not go through it.

That is the whole of the routine. Boots, the dog, four hundred yards of lane, and then the top rail with both forearms on it, looking at forty acres of nothing much. Docks in the low corner. Thistle where the drainage went. Grass that is not a crop, just grass, doing what grass does when nobody asks it for anything.

Two seasons. That is what the field says when he looks at it, and it says it in numbers because a field cannot say anything else.

The back went in February of the first year. Not dramatically. He lifted a feed sack the way he had lifted forty thousand feed sacks and something in the low part of him let go, and there were eleven weeks and then an operation and then a physiotherapist half his age telling him, kindly, that the lifting part of his life was over. He did not argue. He had watched his own father argue with a similar sentence and lose.

The first spring he told everybody he was taking a year. The second spring nobody asked.

And this morning, at the gate, with the dog already bored and heading back, the sentence finally came all the way up. Not I miss it. Not I am getting old. The sentence was: whatever I was for, that field was the proof, and there is no proof out there now.

You know that sentence. Maybe your field is a workshop, or a house full of people who have grown up and gone, or a job you did for thirty years that somebody else does now. It does not matter. There is a piece of ground somewhere that used to show what you were for, and it is showing nothing, and you have been quietly reading the nothing as a report on yourself.

Two seasons stopped and one thing did not

I want to set two things side by side at that gate, because they have been one thing in your chest since February of the first year.

The planting stopped. That is a fact, plainly, and I will not dress it up or tell you the fallow was secretly good for the soil. You could not do it, and you did not do it, and two Septembers went past with the drills sitting under a tarp.

The purpose of God did not stop, and it was never the same object as the crop. That is the whole of this and I am saying it early, at the gate, not saving it for the end of the lane. What cannot be stopped is His purpose. Not your back, not your yield, not the drainage in the low corner.

The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations.Psalm 33:11

Notice what that verse quietly does. It sets God's counsel against every plan that men make and it does not sneer at the plans. The whole psalm is about a God who is not impressed by horses and armies, which in your world is machinery and acres, and who has never once needed either. And it says His counsel stands for ever, which means it was standing all through the eleven weeks and the operation and both empty springs.

You are inside a counsel that has been standing since before that farm had a name, and it did not sit down when you did. That is the written word's claim and not my encouragement dressed up as one, and the Holy Spirit who has been at work in you through both fallow years is the evidence that nothing was ever suspended on account of a bad back.

Watch what that does to the accounting you have been running at the gate. If the thing that stands is His, then two seasons of grass is information about a field. It is not information about a man, and it never had the right to become that.

Nobody ever hired you to hold the world up

Here is the second thing, and it takes a load off rather than adding to it.

Somewhere back down the years you got the idea that a purpose of God is a thing a man carries on his back, so that when his back goes the purpose goes with it. That is why the low corner of that field has felt like a verdict. But you were never underneath it. You are inside it, the way a man is inside weather. And a man who thinks he is holding the sky up will read every ache as the end of the world.

You have been carried through both of those seasons, and the carrying never once depended on what came off that ground. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than standing at the gate waiting for you to get back to the drills.

There is one more thing to say straight, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into the thing this site refuses to be. Nothing here is telling you to plant it next year. Not next year and not ever. If that field grows docks for the rest of your life you have not stepped one inch outside the purpose of God, because getting inside it was never something you earned with a good harvest and staying inside it is not something you keep up by working. That is the difference between a son and a tenant, and there are a great many good men farming as tenants of a God who adopted them.

And this is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not going to leave you with a warm thought at a cold gate. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken, not chewed on. And the thing in the way is not the back and it is not the field. It is a sentence: there is no proof out there now. That sentence has run your mornings unopposed for two years, because nobody has ever answered it out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with authority leaning on a gate at half past six. Scripture gives you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself you could put behind them.

If the two seasons have taken you somewhere darker than disappointment, and there are mornings you would rather not get up at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone line.