Four Winters and Nothing in the Rows

The fourth February, and he is standing in the rows at about half past four in the afternoon with the light going the way it goes, flat and gold and along the ground, and there is nothing out here.

Not nothing as in a bad year. He has had bad years. Nineteen ninety eight was a bad year and he can tell you about it and there is a story in it. This is the fourth one running, and there is no story in it, and that is a different thing entirely.

He took this ground on a handshake in the spring four years back. Twenty two acres, and it had been sitting, and everybody said it would come back. He has done everything you do. He put lime on it the first year. He rotated it. He did not push it. He drilled it late once because the weather said so and early once because the weather said so, and he has stood at the counter at the co-op having the same conversation with four different men about drainage, and he has spent money he did not have twice.

And it comes up thin, and it comes up patchy, and it comes off light, and there is no reason anybody can find.

He is fifty seven. He is standing in it in February in a coat that is not warm enough, and there is frost still in the shadow of the fence line where the sun has not been all day, and he has been out here about twenty minutes, which is nineteen minutes longer than he came out for.

And he said it out loud. He said: this ground has given me nothing.

Then he stood there, because there is a thing that happens after you say something like that out loud in an empty field, which is that you wait, the way you wait after a shout in a barn, to hear whether it comes back at you.

It did not come back. Nothing came back. The light went a bit lower and a bird went over and that was the whole of it.

You have stood in that. It might not be ground. It might be a business, a course of treatment, a marriage you have been doing everything right in, a stretch where you have done every single thing you know to do and it has come up thin four years running. And there is a chapter in the prophets where a man stands exactly here and does something nobody expects, and it is not what people think it is.

He named every empty thing before he said yet

I have to be careful right here, because there is a version of this that arrives with a reason for four years. God is teaching you something about dependence. The ground is being prepared. Wait for the fifth. I am not going to say any of it. Scripture does not explain his four years, and I am not going to manufacture a reason and hang God's name on it.

What Scripture does is stranger and much better. At the end of Habakkuk, after three chapters of a man arguing with God about violence and injustice and getting answers he does not like, he says this:

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

Count what he lists. Figs. Vines. Olives. Fields. Flock. Herd. Six things, named one at a time, and every single one of them empty. He does not round it off. He does not say things are difficult at the moment. He goes down the row and names each failure by its own name, out loud, and only then does he say yet.

You are allowed to say the whole list out loud, and saying it is not unbelief. That is not me being generous with the text; Habakkuk 3:17 is six clauses of nothing and the Holy Spirit who preserved it put every clause in, which means a man standing in his own rows saying this ground has given me nothing is doing something Scripture already did.

And notice what the yet is not. He does not say yet the harvest is coming. He does not say yet next year. There is no promise about the fields anywhere in the sentence. The yet turns to a Person, not to a forecast.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat: yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17-18

The verdict that is not on the ground

Now the part that is actually happening out there, because it is not agricultural.

Twenty minutes in a cold field is not about drainage. Somewhere in the fourth year, the question stopped being what is wrong with this ground and became what is wrong with the man who has put four years into it. That move happens quietly and it happens to everybody, and it is the reason he is still standing out there in a coat that is not warm enough.

You were never the same object as your ground, and four thin years have not adjusted what you are worth by one bushel. Ephesians 2:10 says you are His workmanship, made in Christ Jesus, and workmanship is a word about somebody else's hands; the Spirit who carried that sentence into the letter did not attach a yield clause to it.

This is yours right now, standing in the rows: a standing that no season sets. Romans 8:38 says nothing present and nothing to come can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and things present covers the fourth February; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) is out here in the frost.

What the yet actually costs

Let me be honest about the hardest line in the passage, because people quote it as if it were easy.

Habakkuk's yet is not cheerfulness. He has just finished saying that his belly trembled, his lips quivered at the voice, and rottenness entered into his bones (Habakkuk 3:16). He is a man physically shaking, and out of that he says he will rejoice in the Lord, and there is nothing in his hands to rejoice about.

That is not denial. Denial would be pretending the fields are full. He counts every empty thing first, in detail, and then rejoices in a Person who is not the fields.

You have something to rejoice in that is not the yield and never was. Habakkuk 3:18 says the God of my salvation, which is a possession no season touches, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line is the one who makes it possible to say when a man's own bones feel like they have rot in them.

Fruit is not output, and twenty two thin acres is where you can see the seam. Output is what came off the ground: light, patchy, four years running. Fruit is what grew on a man who kept going back out in February for something that has given him nothing, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that longsuffering and part of it faithfulness, and neither of them shows up in a yield.

And I am not going to tell you the fifth year will come good. I do not know. Nobody who talks to you about God is authorized to tell you that. What can be said is that the years were in His hand and that the Spirit was in the rows with you, and neither of those needs a harvest to be true.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes the truck takes to warm up, tell Him about one morning out on this ground that produced nothing at all. The frost line along the fence. A bird. Something you thought about at the far end and never said. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody weighs that.