The Fallow Ground
It’s Saturday morning. I woke to find my fiancée on my couch in my living room. She’s in town for the weekend and stayed with a nearby friend last night. We made breakfast, watched a documentary about disappearing bees, and now I’m sitting in an empanada shop having coffee while she gets her hair done at a salon across the way.
What a wonderful morning.
Eight months ago when I started this blog, I anticipated a season of suspense, some time lying fallow before new life blossomed in my life. I anticipated moving to Chula Vista to join friends church planting there. I prepared for my job to be one of the things that had to die before the new life there could be born. I expected waiting a while longer before my wife came into my life.
Well, I am moving to Chula Vista in a couple of months. I do not have to lose my job to do so though, and as the second sentence of this post indicates, I am no longer waiting for a wife.
The fallen furrows have shot up new shoots. A green tint has settled over the brown. Decay has made way for resurrection. The field is fallow no longer. It is alive.
And I am sitting here placidly on a Saturday morning marveling at the magic my Lord has worked into the fabric of creation, that things faithfully buried spring up into new life year after year after year. God’s faithfulness is so sure, we often take it for granted. We ought not.
Let me say this clearly – God is good. Just give God time. “Time is the realm of love,” I once heard a theologian say, because “in time” is when what’s never-failing is proven to never fail. Learn to appreciate both the seasons of response and the seasons of repose, the seasons of plenty and the seasons of replenishment. Learn that God is present through it all.
And this is love. It is worked into the soil. It stretches up into the sky. It feeds us. It holds us in its bosom when we no longer need feeding. And it cradles us until we are finally, one glorious day, gathered into the unmediated presence of Love.
This is ever the fallow ground, tiny epicycles of the eschatological reality of all that is – a movement in love for love to love with love for ever and ever.
Love.
Amen.