Three Years Of Drought And Still Farming

He has the books out on the kitchen table again and they still do not work.

Three dry years. Not bad years. Dry ones, back to back, the kind where you buy hay in July that you were supposed to cut in June, and then do it again the next year, and then again. He has run the numbers a dozen times over the winter, sitting where he is sitting now with a mug going cold, and every time he gets to the same place: by the middle of the second year that operation should have stopped.

It did not stop. He is looking out of that window at his own fields.

At the co op last week somebody said, you are too stubborn to quit, and laughed, and clapped him on the shoulder. He laughed too. He has heard versions of it all winter. He is the man who held on.

But he keeps a ledger, and a ledger is not a mood. And a man who keeps a ledger knows the difference between an explanation and a compliment, and stubbornness is a compliment. There is a hole in his accounts about the size of a farm and nobody at the co op has any idea it is there.

You know this. Yours may not be a farm. But there is something in your life that did not go under and should have, and the people around you have a word for it, and their word does not match your arithmetic.

Count what three dry years took

Nobody at the co op has counted it, so let us.

It took the machinery replacement he had planned for the second year, which means he is running everything two seasons past where it should be. It took two of his neighbors, who sold. It took the ordinary pleasure of walking his own ground, because for three summers every field was a calculation.

And it took his sleep in a specific way: not lying awake worrying, which he could have handled, but waking at four with figures already going, which is different and worse.

You have been running an operation on a shortfall for three years, and God has never once handed you an invoice for the difference. Psalm 145:15 says the eyes of all wait on Him and He gives them their food in due season, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it at a kitchen table with a ledger open on it. The hole in the accounts is not a failure of bookkeeping.

The verse for a man whose figures do not work

There is one passage built for exactly this table.

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 and 18

That is a farmer's list. Figs, vines, olives, fields, and then the barn and the stall in the next line. It is not a poetic list of hardships. It is an audit, and every item on it fails.

And then the word that turns the whole thing: yet. Not because the figures improve, because they do not, and the passage never says they do. The joy is relocated rather than restored, and it is His Spirit who makes that a live option at a kitchen table rather than a heroic sentiment from a long time ago.

You are still standing on ground that did not produce, and the standing was never a product of the ground. That is not a nice thought about a hard three years. The written word puts every line of the audit at zero and then puts the man on something else entirely, and the Spirit is the one who has kept a gate open that the numbers closed in the second year. The co op said stubborn. Habakkuk never once says stubborn.

And this needs saying plainly. Three dry years are not a display. They were not arranged so a district could learn something about grit by watching a man hold on. God did not withhold rain to make a point at the co op. You are not an exhibit and you never were.

Two things a man with a hole in his books has to hear

The first is that God still provides. Not provided, poetically, in an older world. Provides, present tense, in this decade, on this ground.

The second is that the provision was not a reward for how he farmed through it. He farmed through it badly in places and he knows exactly where.

You were carried through three years that your own resources could not have funded, and the carrying did not depend on your farming it well. Psalm 37:25 says the righteous is not forsaken, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes not forsaken a fact about a specific gate rather than a general principle.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the four in the morning figures have gone somewhere heavier than figures, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please say it out loud today to one real person, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not weakness in a farmer. That is God sending help with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.