Maybe it’s just too many changes, too many challenges, too many – well too many of what I don’t want to deal with just now, that caught up to me. I am weary and I am tired, lacking in both imagination and enthusiasm. So, I was grateful to come across these words from Howard Thurman as he writes of the “Fallow time.”

*“There is a fallow time for the spirit when the soil is barren because of sheer exhaustion. It may come unannounced like an overnight visitor ‘passing through.’ It may be sudden as a sharp turn-in on an unfamiliar road. It may come at the end of a long, long period of strenuous effort in handling some slippery in-and-out temptation that fails to follow a pattern. It may result from the plateau of tragedy that quietly wore away the growing edge of alertness until nothing was left but the exhausted roots of aliveness . . . The time is not wasted. The time of fallowness is a time of rest and restoration, of Ailing up and replenishing. It is the moment when the meaning of all things can be searched out, tracked down and made to yield the secret of living.”

I’m reminded that God restores and renews, heals and make whole.  If we let it, the fallow time can be a place of rest and re-creation.

“God heals the wounds of every shattered heart.” Psalm 147:3 TPT

*From Howard Thurman’s book, “Deep is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness” (p. 88 & 89). Papamoa Press