rotated your crops lately?

  As I was listening to our Bible teacher Sunday talk about doing things, like evangelizing outside of our comfort zones, I thought about how incredibly smart God is.  Now I know that’s no big surprise to most of you, but I’m always amazed at really how simple God tries to make things for us. 

I know that probably none of us were/are farmers, but some of our parents or grandparents may have been.  So maybe we’ve never used the terms fallow ground or crop rotation in our everyday conversations.  A quick explanation, fallow ground is land that is usable but is left to lie dormant for a period of time to give it a chance to build the nutritional value back into the soil.  Crop rotation is another way that farmers do this but just planting different plants in the same soil.  They found that planting the same plants over and over in the same soil causes the plants to eventually become weak or not grow at all.  Just by changing the crop, say from corn to beans, it causes the soil to re-energize, if you will. 

As David was teaching yesterday, I thought about how God lets us go “fallow” or “rotates our crops” sometimes.  Things that used to get us fired up aren’t as exciting.  Things that used to work every time we witnessed to someone, don’t work quite as well.  We may feel like we’re just not being used like we were before.  Or that God isn’t listening to us anymore.  Or even that we’re past our prime and unusable.  No, I think that sometimes we get so used to planting the same seed in the same soil that God is trying to shake us up a bit.  So things that used to work don’t work anymore.  Maybe it’s time to give it a rest. This is when we perhaps move out of one type of service to another. Or we just begin to soak in the word for a while without “giving it all back out”.  

Your fallow or rotation and mine may be different.  I may need to take a year sabbatical to recharge.  You may just need a weekend retreat to get alone with God and see where he’s taking you.  Or maybe it’s not rest that you need but a change of service.   You may decide that foreign mission work is your new soil.  I may feel that teaching 3 year olds is mine. 

Now of course, we can take this concept to an extreme and never get back into service, but if your heart is right, you’ll be looking for the next place that God wants you. We must be careful about how long we lie fallow, because weeds love fallow ground.  Also fallow ground can become hardened.  We don’t want to have to do a lot of “tilling” or hoeing to get back into service.

The point is that fallow ground is usable.  It’s just a matter of using the rest and/or being willing to accept a new “crop” so that the value God has instilled in you is used again for His purposes.