Out of Sync
- Jen Aldrich
- Jan 19, 2021
- 2 min read
We all like to feel that we’re achieving things, moving ahead, contributing to the collective good. This takes actual effort, focus, time and energy. You have to kind of know what you’re trying to accomplish too. We want to bear fruit. And, in fact, that is our design and mandate as a Christian. Be fruitful, be in a fruitful season.
Lately I’ve been feeling out of season. And out of sync. Okay, I’m not even sure what season it is at times as I look around me. As our nation shifts from 45 to 46 there are massive goals for the first — not 100, but 10 days — no time to waste. Focus on achievement, fruitfulness.
On a walk the other day I saw buds on a snowy bush. Middle of January. It’s winter. Buds are supposed to be resting and readying. Not blooming yet. But there they are, ambitious. Okay.
What I’m learning is I can no longer compare my season with yours. Or maybe my fruitfulness, my ambition, my work, just looks different right now. The growth I’m being asked to feed is in the roots and in the interval invisible work of my heart. Maybe it’s engaging with grief that’s been ignored too long. Or engaging with a call to lament.
Maybe the stillness of this fruitless winter season is just the gift I need to take a long look at the health of my own roots—family lines and patterns of thinking, bias, fear, trauma. Sometimes God wants to go back and do the foundation work again.
Will we say yes? So we can bear better fruit later?
[Side note: I believe this type of work is for our nation too; we gotta start with ourselves.]
JOURNAL ENTRY: What season are you in? What’s the work of growth look like? Is it a time to stop and allow room for processing grief, engaging with lament, taking a long look at generational patterns or traumas? These are big questions. Journal about it and see what comes.
“Yahweh would speak with Moses face to face [outside the camp] as a young man speaks with his friend. And then Moses would return to the camp.” (Exodus 33:11) ... God longs to speak to us outside of the camp, outside of the political and religious hustle. And give us wisdom, insight, strength of godly character that can stand up to and challenge the rhetoric of the day. But we gotta get alone with the Lord where we can hear, where we will allow ourselves to be shaken. We gotta step out of sync with the momentum of life and find our place of perspective from which we can speak new words of life. It also may take some time…