This is a Tilling Season & The Cost of Oil is Going Up
That’s what I heard when I woke up this morning…
“This is a tilling season.”
I’ve been feeling an urgency and a conviction about how I spend these last days ahead of quarantine.
Yesterday I read a post traveling around Facebook that said the root word for quarantine is 40. Makes sense. Cuarenta in Spanish is 40.
There was no author attached, so I can’t give due credit. But they mentioned all the 40s in the Bible… Jesus fasting for 40 days. The 40 years in the desert. Etc.
I could not stop thinking about it while I was digging in the dirt with my youngest. Just digging and singing and pulling up a couple easy weeds.
It all comes back to me when I hear, “This is a tilling season.”
I feel strongly that this quarantine is nothing to complain about.
We’ll look back with good memories. We’ll remember how people turned friendly and neighborly again, calling and checking on one another.
But I don’t just want memories of the bike rides and the baking and the manna in the desert.
God kept providing manna and all the Israelites did was whine for quail and for imagined delicacy they never really had back in Egypt. What they were really whining about was CHANGE. They had just been given FREEDOM and they whined because it was different than they were used to.
This is a tilling season.
It’s time to break up the fallow ground! There are deep streams of Living Water under the soil and it’s time to break up the dry ground on top and dig up the Ancient Wells.
If you’re literal like my husband, let me say this in less poetic language. Let me be blunt. It’s time to press in to the Word and Prayer. Like now!
“The Cost of Oil is going up.”
That’s what Cory Russell said in January and the phrase kind of haunts me. Because I know in my Spirit it is true. (And I don’t mean go out an make a run on olive oil or essential oils. Not at all.)
Oil is a symbol of the intimacy and power of the Holy Spirit that you store up when you spend time with Him, worshiping, praying, listening. That oil is getting more and more costly. It’s going to be harder and harder to store up.
Now is the time to dig up those wells and to store up that Oil.
You and I both KNOW this is true. And we also know it’s getting harder to do so. There’s incredible levels of distraction, diversion, and division of our attention and affections for the Lord.
I feel it. Don’t you?
There’s this heavy fog of spiritual apathy or laziness. When we are given another curve ball on our schedule, routine and circumstances to manage, we can press in the Lord or we can put Him off for the day we kind of feel back to normal. I know that I am not the only one. I don’t want to squander this gift of time.
Who else has been putting off Truest Intimacy and Worship?
Did we just get tired?
Then let us rest, but rest in His Presence.
Did we suddenly just get too busy?
Then let us seek Him first to order and re-prioritize our days.
Let us worship and praise Him throughout our tasks.
This is a tilling season. If you don’t let quarantine break up what’s hardened in your heart, you’ll miss out on the seeds, the rain, and the fruit of the coming Harvest.
Dear God,
make our hearts fertile soil. Make us tender ground.
Help us identify the weeds. Lord, uproot the weeds of apathy, laziness, and taking you for granted.
Till up the memories that have turned us hard. Till up the arguments and false agreements we’ve made about our loved ones, your Church, those around us. Till up false gods and the things we set our hearts on that aren’t You.
Forgive us for turning away from you or taking you for granted, God. Even if it’s just slightly. Just a quiet turning beginning.
Turn our hearts back to you, Our First Love.
In Jesus’s name, amen
Everything I write is laced with prayer, redemption, and the bliss of surrender.
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