The Crop She Did Not Plant

She did not sow the top field.

That is the whole of it and it takes about four seconds to say, and it took her all winter to be able to say it to herself in those words.

She had a reason. She was sure. Not vaguely, not hopefully. She had gone through it and prayed about it and come to a settled conviction that a particular thing was going to happen before the harvest, and that the top field would not be needed, and that the money the seed would have cost was better used elsewhere.

She used it elsewhere. That part cannot be undone either.

And here she is in the spring with a field of nothing and the neighbors to face.

Nobody has said a word. This is not that sort of valley and they are not that sort of people. But there was a man at the mart in February who did not ask her how the top field was, and she noticed, and she has thought about the not asking a good deal more than she would have thought about being asked.

Here is the part she has told nobody at all.

It is not the money. They will manage. It is worse than the money.

It is that she does not know what to do with the fact that she was that certain and that wrong, and that she cannot now tell the difference, from the inside, between the certainty that turned out to be nothing and the ordinary faith she has lived on since she was twenty.

If you acted on a certainty and are standing in the consequences, come and lean on this gate. Nobody is going to ask you to explain it.

Habakkuk names the empty ground and then puts the joy somewhere else

There is a passage written by a man looking at exactly the same view out of his own door, and it is worth reading in the order he wrote it.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat.Habakkuk 3:17

He lists it. Item by item. He does not round it up into a general difficulty and he does not hurry.

And then, only when the whole inventory is on the ground, he says the other thing.

Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:18

Now look carefully at where the joy is put, because this is the part that saves you.

It is not put in the fields. He does not say the fields will recover, or that the olives will come good, or that God has a better harvest planned. He does not reinterpret the failure at all. He moves his joy to a place the harvest does not reach, and leaves the harvest exactly as empty as it is.

You are able to have joy that the top field cannot touch, and that is what the passage actually offers. Habakkuk 3:18 relocates the rejoicing to the God of salvation rather than to any outcome, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a relocation like that something a person can actually do rather than admire, which means the empty ground is allowed to stay empty while you are held.

Being certain and being wrong is not the same as being faithless

Now the thing nobody has been told, because it is the real one.

You cannot tell the difference from the inside. The certainty that came to nothing felt like the faith you have lived on since you were twenty, and now you distrust the instrument.

You are holding a faith that came through a wrong season without a crack in it, and the instrument was never the thing that failed. Habakkuk 3:17 lists the fig tree and the vine and the olive and the fold, every one of them empty, and then turns on a single word, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the whole inventory in the verse ahead of the yet, which means a person who cannot feel the difference is still standing exactly where the prophet stood.

I am not going to tell you how to tell the difference, because that would be a lie dressed as help, and men have written whole systems for it and none of them work from inside a bad spring.

What I can tell you is what your wrongness did not do.

It did not make God unreliable. It did not put you outside anything. It did not cancel twenty years, and it is not evidence that all of it was the same mistake in slower motion.

You were wrong about a timing and you were not wrong about a Person. 2 Timothy 1:12 has a man saying I know whom I have believed, with a Person as the object rather than a plan, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that fastened in somebody whose plan has come apart, which means the instrument you are distrusting was never the thing holding you up.

And I am not going to tell you why it did not happen. Nobody knows. Anybody offering you a reason from a distance is guessing at your life and will move on afterwards, and you will still be standing at this gate.

You have been held all winter, including through the part where you could not say it in words. Isaiah 41:10 says fear thou not, for I am with thee, and I will strengthen thee, and it is His Spirit who is called the Helper, which means the woman who took all winter to be able to name it was not doing that on her own.