Bearing Fruit With a Baby

It’s a year to bear fruit and I’m sitting here staring at that great visual.  The top of my bookshelf, the FAITH, the us, our kiss, the LOVE, the woman under the tree nursing her baby, and it’s not such a small one.  It’s about the size of mine, nearly one and needing the nurture more now than ever.   

They told me life would change when I had a baby and I knew it would, but for four months it didn’t really.  She was too small to move, and I could do nearly everything I could before.  The meetings, the ministry, the prayer rooms for hours, the Sunday School, the youth group for the teenage girls that I had taught in the highschools and who had stared at my rounding belly growing fuller each week.  Those girls who had promised and begged for baby-sitting rights.

Slowly it all started to change, and I struggled to keep up.  I knew I had to lay stuff down, but I struggled against the pruning.  I was surely bearing fruit, but all my opportunities started getting snipped away, because now she could move and talk and crawl away and wouldn’t keep quietly sleeping through each meeting. 

My sister had made me the wire tree for Christmas.  She said it was a prophetic gift and this was the year for bearing fruit.    I had asked Stephen only days before Christmas to make me a wire tree, but he didn’t have time, but my sister did, and she who didn’t know my request, had it whispered in her ear by God.  I tried so hard for the first half of the year to keep up.  Keep up with meetings and the friends who could be so busy without a baby.    I tried to grow fruit and grew frustration. 

I set goals that I met and then couldn’t and got frustrated and wondered why my baby couldn’t just be ‘normal’ and settle into a routine. Not while her Mummy was busy dashing here there and everywhere. 

This week my mother and father in law came visiting after a family funeral.  It was his birthday so they bought us a vacuum cleaner, and they cleaned my house and called it a holiday.   My windows, my floor, my sink all sparkling clean and at the round table we sat to talk, and I asked him what it meant to bear fruit, and he, who has struggled with burn out and not doing enough for God,  said that it meant first there had to be a pruning of the activities that were no longer bearing fruit so that I could focus on the areas that were.

Thank you father in law; that one sentence has freed me to do what I need to do.  To spend time in the Word, to journal and hear God’s heart, and to write down the revelation for everyone.  To not try anymore to bear fruit but to water my soul so that it can and to grow my baby into a girl who is in love with her Heavenly Daddy because her mummy is, and little girls copy their mummies. 

It’s my year of Hope and Growth, of understanding that life is a journey and I’m learning I can’t make all my dreams and desires happen instantly.   

Linking up at: Thriving Thursday