Field Burning

"You're blessed when you've lost it all

God's kingdom is there for the finding"

Driving back home one day, I passed through fields and fields. . . all barren.  It is, after all, winter. The rubble of whatever the crops had been covered the land and I thought to myself:  these fields need to be burned to start over.  Now,  I am no agricultural guru and I highly doubt that I have a green thumb, but the thought sprung from a story David Peters told one evening for Vespers.  He spoke of field burning as the necessary step between harvest and planting a new crop.  

It was the creation of a literal clean slate in the land, ridding it of weeds and old seed to make room for the new. He told of the marked difference of stepping off the old field onto the newly burned ground. And before I finished remembering, a next thought came: that field is me. 

The harvested crops, the rubble, the fire. . . So many times my journey with Jesus seems to go around a big circle and when I think I may be close to the next mile marker Im right back to where I started. Two steps forward, one step back. . . or five.  But no, growing to maturity is not a circle, nor is it a shortest distance from point A to point B, not a straight line, but it is as my dear college mentor once told me.  It is a big U, going downward to the Valley of the Shadow and coming up for air 1/2 an inch taller maybe. . . God never asking us to have "more" faith, but to have the same faith than when we started...to trust him like a child trusts a father, and after the valley we have a faith that is no longer childish and thus like a child, but now mature and yet maintaining childlikeness. . . because we made it through holding His hand.

So then, I accept and weep at the present barreness of my field, the harvest has gone and now I welcome however reluctantly,  the flames, the loss, the blazing of all I am and have for His laying of a new ground.  Burn us up, O King. . .