what is the cost of resisting the harvest?
What do we do when faced with the consequences of our boundaries? What happens when it’s painful to be misunderstood or not given the benefit of the doubt. When people you love continue to choose to believe the worst or at the very least don’t seem to care to find out the truth. How do you reconcile that? What happens then?
We came up on that this week. We were faced yet again with the choice do we hold the line in love with our arms outstretched? Or do we run after, chase down, explain our hearts and intentions for what feels like the 1000th time? I’m reminded of Matthew 10, Mark 13, Luke 12 – it’s one thing to read it. A very different thing to live it.
I trust God is working. In fact I cling to the verses like “The Lord your God in your midst, The Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”” Zephaniah 3:17 NKJV and fact that He is in our midst and moving. So what happens when that movement isn’t to my pace or with the results I was hoping for? Do I still trust when His movement isn’t the rescue I was expecting, the understanding, healing, restoration we long for?
To Scotty I cried – “What are we doing wrong? Why isn’t this getting better? How long?” To which he replied “Why do you think that we are doing something wrong just because it hasn’t turned out yet? I think we are supposed to keep waiting and trusting.”
So we decided to quiet our response, trust in the Holy Spirit and ask Him to give us more grace, more mercy, more understanding.
And in our questioning, crying out, the Lord revealed in His graciousness, a thread this week that is still ongoing, still connecting.
On Thursday as I was praying I felt like the Lord was pushing me to consider whether I actually want to be set apart or not? Do I want the life He promises, that comes with loss of relationship, in your face costs and potential misunderstandings? Or do I want to stay? Will I return to my old ways? Am I a remnant or not?
I thought I had decided that, but realized I needed the reassurance yet again that following His leading is worth the cost. This time my processing with the Lord has led me to consider the costs of both. So often we are faced with what our decision to follow the Holy Spirit’s leading has cost us. It’s because it is in our faces, so much missed potential and relationship that it’s the easiest thing to hone in on. Except this time I felt myself considering what the cost would be if I didn’t choose the Lord’s leading. Oof.
On Friday morning in a devotional plan on the Bible app I’m studying Elijah with a friend, we read about how Elijah’s upbringing, where he was raised and the “limitations” caused by his “sheltering”, obscurity, prepared him. THAT was the thing that set him apart to be used specifically by God. Here’s the excerpt from the Elijah study
“Gilead was hill country, covered with dense forests and wild undergrowth. It was remote and uncivilized. Even its name—Gilead— means “rocky” or “rugged.” That’s where Elijah was from. And that’s who Elijah was. A mountain man. A tough, adventurous, free-ranging spirit.
Elijah came from a hard place. A rough place. An obscure place. The right place to be prepared for what God had in store for him.
For Elijah, the fact that he was raised in an uncouth environment; the fact that he wasn’t brought up around more urbane, cultured tastes and people; the fact that he grew up at a distance from mass civilization; the fact that he had no lineage or pedigree even worth mentioning in the Bible. There was a reason for it.
God used it to give Elijah a clear, objective view of the duplicity that existed in the seat of Israel’s power. By virtue of his outback upbringing, Elijah had not been tainted by living up close to the idolatrous influences of the city, nor dulled into spiritual apathy by its pious religious activity. Instead he was able to nurse a growing indignation about the declined moral state because he hadn’t been absorbed into its fabric. Being from lowly regarded Gilead, Elijah was naturally unencumbered by the need to impress and please others, which made him an ideal mouthpiece for delivering the righteous message God wanted him to convey.
During Elijah’s unrecorded years in Gilead, he somehow came to know, to really know, Yahweh.
One way or another, while doing his tedious, mundane, lonesome work, while facing hardships we’ll never know, Elijah had been exposed to influences that convinced him Jehovah wasn’t just one deity among many other options. He’d developed a deep knowledge, reverence, and understanding for Yahweh’s covenant with His people, a holy perspective that would form the basis for his first prophetic declaration in Scripture. This God, Israel’s God, was a jealous God who had no intention of sharing His glory with man-made idols.
That’s what Elijah learned in Gilead.”
Here’s my paraphrase:
During Bethany’s adult years, she somehow came to know, to really know, Yahweh.
One way or another, while doing her tedious, mundane, everyday work, while facing hardships she didn’t understand, Bethany had been exposed to influences that convinced her that Jehovah wasn’t just one deity among many other options. She’d developed a deep knowledge, reverence, and understanding for Yahweh’s covenant with His people, a holy perspective that would form the basis for her legacy, her family line, her life long walk with God. This God, Israel’s God, was a jealous God who had no intention of sharing His glory with man-made idols.
Lord let it be so.
My 2 raised beds of bush beans are beautiful. And ready to be picked. So this morning I was up early to go out and pick my first harvest of green beans. I know how to pick them, but just wanted to make sure I was harvesting them correctly. So I looked them up in my garden book and got the reassurance I needed. This line stopped me. “The more you pick, the more you get. Harvesting continually encourages the plant to keep producing buds and fruit.”
These beans are hanging on the plants, ready to be harvested and if I keep at it, I can expect that the fruit will keep coming.
Ooooh is that your play God?
I wrote extensively in the Abundance Challenge series about a reckoning, come to Jesus, harvest moment I had in the driveway in 2023. Is this part of it? Is this the fruit that keeps coming, is this fruit coming to harvest because of the picking back then?
And if that’s the case, then I submit myself to it. I’m here because You are a good Gardener. A trustworthy, carefully tending, gently weeding, preparedly staking, in just the right time watering, fertilizing Gardener. You know the right time to harvest and I trust you.
Remind me that when I feel like resisting the Harvest, feel like I’m being cut loose, that it’s for Your Bounty and my good, that now I should begin looking for, anticipating the fruit. Not concerned or frustrated by what the harvest cost me. By what being cut off, picked, chosen, removed from looks like to others. Give me the courage to look forward, to be in anticipation of further fruit this harvest made a way for, not second guessing what was or could have been if hung on and had stayed longer.
The fear of missing out in the here and now, being viewed as <whatever you want to insert here>, misunderstood and seemingly not worth the work it takes to understand, is the cost we are gladly (most days) paying to follow HIs call to be set apart. To be changed, to be renewed, to be restored to Him.
To be harvested for His glory and our good!
