Sowing In The Frost

The ground rings under her boots. That is the thing about a January field: it is not soft and quiet, it is hard and it answers back.

She walks it most mornings. Not for any reason she could defend. The path goes round the edge and takes about twenty-five minutes and she has done it in every kind of weather for years, and this morning it is white all over and the light is that thin blue that does not seem to come from anywhere.

Six years. That is what she is doing out here, and she knows it, and she has stopped pretending otherwise.

Six years of praying for the same handful of people and the same handful of situations. Six years of a Tuesday evening that four people attend. Six years of turning up, and writing things down, and asking, and asking.

Not one of them has changed in any way she can point to. Not one. She has checked, honestly, the way an honest person does: is there anything, anything at all, and the answer keeps coming back that there are some things that might be slightly better and might just be time passing.

The sentence in the frozen field is not God is not listening. She has thought that and dismissed it and thought it again. It is quieter and more corrosive: six years of sowing, and there is nothing in this ground.

You know that field. It might be prayer, or a marriage you have been quietly working at, or a child you have been holding on for. There is something you have put six or ten or twenty years into with no visible return, and you have started walking round the edge of it in the cold, checking.

The psalm puts the tears in the sowing

There is a short psalm about people coming home from exile, and it contains a promise about sowing that almost nobody reads at the right speed.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.Psalm 126:5

Look at where the tears are. Not in the waiting, and not in the reaping. In the sowing. The psalm assumes that some sowing is done weeping, by people who cannot see anything coming, and it does not treat that as a problem to be corrected. It treats it as the normal condition of a certain kind of sower.

And notice what the promise actually does and does not say. It does not say when. It does not say what the harvest looks like. It does not promise that the sower is the one who sees it come up.

You are a sower, and the tears you have sown with have never once been counted as a fault in the sowing. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing I have chosen for a woman in a cold field, and the Holy Spirit who has been in every one of those Tuesday evenings is the evidence that nothing you have put in this ground has gone in alone.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you run walking the edge. If sowing in tears is a scriptural category, then six years with nothing visible is information about the season and the ground and the timing, none of which anybody hands to a sower. It is not information about the sowing, and it never had the standing to become that.

Nobody here will tell you what God is doing under there

Here is the second thing, and it is where this could go wrong and will not.

People will explain the silence. They will say God is doing something deeper. That the answer is on its way. That you would not believe what is happening under the surface. And they say it warmly, and none of them knows, and the confident version of it has damaged a great many faithful people who then had to survive the years when nothing came up.

Scripture is more honest and much sturdier. It says God wastes nothing and that no one can find out the work He is doing. It never once tells a sower what is happening under a frozen field.

You have been carried through all six of those years, and the carrying did not thin out because nothing came up. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at work in those situations you have been praying about rather than waiting for evidence to appear on your side.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to keep going. Nothing here is asking you for another six years, or for a renewed commitment, or for more faith in the asking. If you never walk that path again and never write another name down you have not stepped one inch outside what God is doing.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought on frozen ground. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not turned over on a twenty-five minute walk for years. And the thing in the way is not the people you have prayed for. It is a sentence: there is nothing in this ground. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority in a field at half past seven in January. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much you believed while saying them.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than discouragement, and there are mornings you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.