Harnessing my Inner Farmer

I daydream about living on a farm. It’s an inner craving for simplicity to have a plot of land in the countryside, a place that I and my little family can tend to and cultivate and call our own.

Of course, I haven’t a clue about what it actually means to farm land. I’ve only read about it, or seen farmers in passing who are plowing, planting, harvesting, and the like.

We holidayed in northern Scotland this past August and stayed in a lovely cottage surrounded by barley fields. We arrived just as harvesting was commencing, so, the gorgeous, golden fields around us began looking like this:

As I went on solitary walks near these fields, I felt a stirring of sorts within me. These harvested fields spoke to me of my own life, and I heard an echoing inside of me saying: “It’s harvest time.”

Our lives have seasons. Some are more obvious seasons - childhood, adolescence, motherhood/fatherhood, single, married, for some - single again, career, retirement - and the list goes on.

Some seasons are more subtle though and tend to involve our inward journey. These are the seasons that take your “inner farmer” to discern and to steward because they are not outwardly obvious.

For example, are you in a season where you need to plow the soil around you and plant seeds? Are you needing to step out there and learn new something new? Or perhaps invest time and energy into something that will be worth the effort later on down the road? Or maybe it’s a time for you to adjust to the environment in which you have been planted and allow your roots to slowly sink in?

Is this a season of watering and tending to what has already been planted? A season marked by patience and faithfulness. A time in your life where slow and steady is necessary and you won’t always see what is happening below the surface.

For many people, I believe this season is also harvest time.

A time when many of the things you have been stewarding deep within you come into fruition. Places of growth that culminate as you launch into a new era in your life. This might have an outward effect. You may decide to start a new habit, or go back to university, or try your hand creatively in a way you’ve always dreamt of.

But the harvest may also happen in ways that are only noticeable to those closest to you. A shift that takes place on such a deep level that you are able to let go of things that were holding you back and simply step into other places, new emotional frontiers, as a result.

Harvest time isn’t easy. It requires effort and determination. But harvest allows us to walk in greater personal fulfilment and bless others around us with what has been growing and developing deep within the inner chambers of our heart.

So what area of your life is it harvest time? What needs to happen for the harvest to be gathered in and then dispersed to those around you?

It’s time for you to go after it, and the world is waiting in anticipation.