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I'm sick today. Praise God for NyQuil. Being sick always makes me sleep which is good I suppose because then I don't know how bad I feel. Of course it is also bad because it limits the prep time on the message for tomorrow night. Hopfully I'll still have a voice.
Which brings me to December being our 'fallow month'. Some of you have wondered why and how and where we came up with the fallow month concept. Growing up on the farm in Iowa I learned a little bit about the importance of fallowness. Every seven years on a rotating basis a corn or bean field would be left fallow. No beans or corn would be produced and the field would be left alone. Usually grass would grow and little creatures would come and make places to live and the land would just rest. The next year the land would be plowed and tilled and crops planted again. The year after a fallow year always produced the best crops.
There was a field just over the hill on our farm that never produced anything. A few years ago I asked my uncle (who was farming the farm I grew up on) why that land was always pasture. At the bottom of the hill there were ponds and a creek and I had fond memmories of playing in the pasture. But in the ever increasing demands placed on the land to be productive I wondered why it was not being used. My uncle explained that it was a 'sump hill', that is, a hill that had constant drainage. It was land that because it did not use its water was unable to be useful for anything but pasture. The pools and creek at the foot of the hill emptied into the Lower Skunk River and were carried away by the river.
The have torn down the farm I loved. All the buildings are gone. Only the house was still standing on my last visit. Uncle John and Aunt Wilma were retired and lived in the house. It has since been torn down and they have moved to Pella, but on that last trip I got to spend a couple nights in the house. I went exploring and was surprised when I discovered the ponds were gone and the sump hill was covered with corn. Beautiful corn. Tall corn. Taller than the corn in the surrounding fields. I asked Uncle John about it. He said that the conglomerate that operated the farm had come in and laid culverts that diverted the water and had discovered ways to take what was bad and turn it into good. He smiled as he said, "That worthless pasture land is now some of the richest land on this farm. It laid fallow all these years and now it is yielding far more than any other field."
A fallow time is a time to lay down your burdens and the hustle of your life and just rest. Rest from the demands you place on yourself and just reflect on the beauty of what God has done and is doing in you. Eric's desire that we invite others into our fields at this time is a good invitation. Share your down time with your friends. But don't get so busy that you start feeling like you have to 'produce' again.
There is something special in the number seven. Every seven days we have a Sabbath rest. Every seven years the Israelites let their land rest. Every 49 years (in the 50th year) a year of Jubillee was declared when all that had been taken was restored and returned and renewed. Seven is a number for fallowness. We need to think about the sevens in our own lives. We should think about our productive time and our down time. Some of us have laid fallow far to long. We have been unproductive and need to have some spiritual surgery done in order to become what we need to be. Some of us have over produced. We have an intense desire to fill every waking moment with service to God and be known by our production. We need to just lay fallow. Just rest. It is so very hard to do because our whole identity is in production and we view fallowness as laziness. We need to find our identity in the Creator and not in what we do for him. We need to be untilled for a while and find him in our fallowness. Some of us are fertile fields, knowing when to rest and when to produce, knowing when to offer ourselves and when to say no. May this last tribe increase and fill the Village.
If fallowness is driving you nuts talk to your leaders and examine yourself. If production is scary, think about what makes you unproductive and talk to your leaders. If you have found balance in your life then revel in a 'fallow month' from the Village activities. And talk to us about that, too. Just don't do it until January. :-)
Rod | 
