Are you . . . fallow ground?

            Suburban kid that I was, I had no experience equipping me to question the elementary school teacher who taught us that one way colonial farmers ensured good crops was to rotate their fields, and every few years allow a field to lie fallow – they would plow the field, but not plant it, and let it rest for a year.

            Yet biologists and agriculturalists today tell us that the field which lies fallow for a season is anything but at rest. That field is full of activity and life – insects and earthworms and bacteria are hard at work regenerating the soil, breaking down organic matter, releasing nutrients, loosening compacted ground.  That field only looks to be at rest, when in fact it is really hard at work, preparing itself for a new growing season.

            I wonder sometimes if this also might not be true in our spiritual lives.  That when those inevitable dark nights of the soul arrive unexpected and uninvited, when a spiritual lethargy seems to grab a hold and we can summon little enthusiasm for church or matters of the spirit, when we feel that we have been abandoned and God does not care, if there is a God at all - - in short, when we might compare ourselves to a fallow field, barren and without growth or evident sign of life – that in fact we might be in a state of ferment below the surface, in a time of preparation, in a necessary stage that is a prelude to something we might not be able to imagine, but which is all the more wonderful for that.

            Maybe, in our bleak spiritual midwinter, when we feel as if we are fallow ground, this should be a cause not of despair, but of expectant hope….