Bearing the Right Fruit in the Right Season

 

 

I was thinking the other day about how we try to do so many things at once, as if we could manage it all, and have you ever noticed how fruit trees start off with small harvests before becoming a bumper bearer?  Sometimes God gives us the grace to manage many things at once and other times, we’ve got to lay things down.  Sometimes if we’ve been through a particularly dry time in our lives, the tree can only keep alive by not bearing beautiful fruit at that time.

And can you imagine an orange tree that tried to hold onto last season’s fruit, in this season?  The fruit is all shrivelled brown and mouldy, it’s better for it to drop off the tree, than for the tree to try to hold onto it. 

When we persist in holding onto things that are not in the right timing for us to bear as fruit, there is no life in it, everything is a struggle.  And we can’t hurry into the things that are on our hearts for next season, but are still budding.  The only way to grow our fruit better is to dig around our roots, by digging into the Word and watering our souls with thankfulness and praise, to spend rich time with God so that the fruit can grow bigger, better and tastier.

I can’t keep teaching Sunday School now in this new season, and try though I would to hold onto it, my fruit was getting mouldy.  In this new season, I know I’m going to be starting a dance school, but I’m slowly budding, studying, learning. 

Is there anything God is challenging you to lay down before it gets mouldy?   Sometimes He asks us to keep doing things that are a struggle, but other times it is a struggle because it isn’t time.   I’m learning what it means to abide.   I’ve shared before about Bearing Fruit When You Have a Baby and what times of pruning look like, in winter when God is asking you to lay more and more down and retreat into Him. 

Then in spring you have wonderful ideas for new things, and things are just falling into your lap, your life is budding, but then comes the hard work of growing those buds into real fruit that others can enjoy, and finally sharing with others in autumn, before we retreat back into God and lay down last seasons harvest so we can have a new one.

In Season is a beautiful book by Wayne Jacobsen, explaining from his perspective of growing up in a vineyard what different seasons in our lives look like.  He explains what it takes in the natural to look after a vineyard and then parallels that with our spiritual lives.







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