Out Standing in the Field

 

 

It is November.  The fields are shorn like a bad haircut, a few dried stalks here and there, but appearing, for the most part, barren and lifeless.

What has grown has been harvested, threshed and cut down.  No sign of growth, no evidence of anything worthwhile, nothing visible or lasting from all the labors and investment, sweat, early morning plowing, continual weeding, watering and a thousand ways of nurturing.

Yet, what is no longer seen appears in different forms and packaging in markets, pantries, kitchen shelves, and tables across the globe. 

Faithfulness, even that which is rarely noticed or barely acknowledged, always spreads fruitfulness over millions of lives, mostly in ways we will never recognize.  It is not that our labors are for naught, but faithfulness is carried into eternity and used in profound ways.

And the prayers we have invested in the lives of those we know, even for strangers halfway around the globe, are tiny planted seeds that God uses to bless, nurture, and produce abundance in ways we will never know until the other side of life. 

God has given each one of us a patch of ground to sow, to care for, to nurture.  But God gives the growth. 1 Corinthians 3. 6

It may feel like we are doing nothing at all, nothing to show for our efforts, to feel perhaps like a kindergartener who can’t even color in the lines, but God runs with it.

After all, a hundred years from now, it will make little difference what people think or say about us, but what God does with us will make a great deal of difference.  (Bible teacher and author Warren Wiersbe)

After all, a hundred years or just twenty minutes from now, praying will make all the difference in the world, not just in someone’s life, but for eternity.  Every time we pray, lives are changed for generations.  No prayers are random or unused in some capacity.  But God feeds a soul, alters circumstances, gives strength, and bears fruit.  Because when God responds, we have no idea the significance of even a single whispered prayer in His grand fruitful Kingdom.

God listens.  God responds.  God changes the landscape of our lives, which is not so barren after all.  Is it our first inclination to come before Him, to call on His name, to spread out our concerns and difficulties and joys before Him?

Tangible “answers” are not the point.  But that we pray and are faithful in the meanwhile.

The harvest of our prayers is far beyond our vision, and most likely not in our timing or visible space, but we can pray.  Trust Me in this. 

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.  Isaiah 43. 19

Not a wasteland in His sight.  But an abundant field sown in prayer, one little patch in His Kingdom.  Because fallow ground is left unsown for a period of time in order to restore and renew, a time not of nothingness, but building a new strength.

And so what we see as fallow is indeed hallowed  --sacred ground not in our hands but in His, a place of trust when we cannot see, but we know He is working.  What we do, how we respond, what we cultivate, indeed, all matters. Even in this season of hope, bathed in prayer, we can grasp our circumstances differently. We listen. We respond. We sow.

God is doing something new in ways we cannot see, even in ways we cannot ever expect.  We ourselves may not be ready for it yet, for seasons or reasons we cannot understand, because this field on which we labor is so much larger than our little patch. 

In the promise of resurrection, that which is broken and despairing looks instead like hope.  Through prayer, God provides the power of seeing things in the past, present and future inextricably linked as they have been, are, and will be.

We are faithful on our little patch of ground.  God brings His fruitfulness to it.  What does prayer have to do with that?  Everything.

 

Though the fig tree should not blossom,

nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

      and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

      and there be no herd in the stalls,

Yet

     I will rejoice in the LORD.

I will take joy

     in the God of my salvation.

GOD, the Lord is my strength;

He makes my feet like the deer’s;

He makes me tread on my high places.

                          Habakkuk 3. 17-19

 

Trust in the slow work of God.  And never give up praying.