Your Coming Season Of Fruitfulness

Here in southern Oregon our peach season has come to an end. I always have a tinge of sadness at this time of year because I love the peaches produced by my favorite orchard. In fact, the last six peaches from the last lug sold to me by the orchardist now sit on our kitchen countertop. They will be gone by tomorrow and the empty countertop will become a reminder of a season that has come to an end. In just a few short weeks the trees in the orchard will announce the approaching winter when the limbs that bore the sweet fruit begin to shed their leaves and remain bare until the blossoms of spring announce another season of harvest.

We have a tendency to look at the seasons of life as single events even though the very nature of the word “seasons” denotes a repeatable event. In some ways we get locked into an empty countertop way of thinking. Like the coming of my favorite peaches each year, life functions in cycles. Empty countertops are just one event in a series of events that are part of the larger definition of a life of fruitfulness.

Some of you are mourning the end of a season in your life. It could be the end of a job, your marriage, a ministry or a friendship. As you rightfully mourn the passing, you need to begin living in anticipation that something new is coming. God is never finished creating. He is not a single season God. In this very moment He is calling into agreement the ingredients of soil, the precise position of the Sun, systems of irrigation and the DNA of my favorite peach trees to begin creating next year’s crop. He is doing the same with your life.

If you are stuck in a place of sorrow over a season of life that has come to an end don’t look at the empty countertop of your life with a sense of finality. It is simply part of the process that will lead you to your next harvest. Look at the empty limbs on the tree of your life and begin to anticipate with hope a coming season of fruitfulness. God has great plans for your next harvest. He is already creating the sweet fruit that will hang once again from your branches.