Fruit in the Barren Places

Fruit in the Barren Places

On New Year’s Eve, I sat in my living room and folded laundry while pondering 2021. I told my husband, sitting on the other couch, that it mostly just felt full of fruitlessness and loss.

My brother-in-law, sister-in-law, nieces, and nephews (our neighbors with whom we carpooled to school and celebrated birthdays, holidays, snow days, pool days, and sometimes even sick days) announced that they were moving back to Pennsylvania.

In March, the field below our house flooded, drowning most of my bees and draining the honey stores they had been cultivating for a year.

It’s also the most fertile land on our property. But we didn’t have the heart to plant a garden after seeing the water-line so high that it nearly covered a tractor and skid steer.

An agent expressed interest in my novel that, months later, fell flat.

The life group we had been a part of for four years dismantled after my brother-in-law and sister-in-law moved away.

My one daughter was not thriving in her classical school environment.

But then I dug more deeply into the year’s apparently “barren” soil and sifted for fruit amid the loss.

Digging Deeper

We moved into our new house in December and were therefore able to open our apartment up to a family in need. (I will be forever grateful to my sister-in-law who used her home designing skills to renovate the apartment to the family’s taste.)

That relationship with this family allowed me to become an “auntie” to two precious little girls who completely stole my heart.

A missionary friend on furlough lived with our family for six months. She became like a daughter/sister to me and role model for my girls. She gave my youngest daughter guitar lessons, helped me chop vegetables for supper, and took the girls for walks down to the creek.

In January, my husband had a clean scan for the second year in a row.

I started writing a new novel.

We hatched guinea fowl from our incubator (those “science experiment” birds now squawk up a storm and poop on my porch) and adopted a pet Holland Lop rabbit named Flopsy.

We purchased a cabin in Wisconsin, which was one of our goals after our family moved back to Tennessee. It needs some love (i.e., remodeling), but we hope to use it for an Airbnb when we are not staying there in the summer and fall. One of the sweetest facts is that the cabin is located closer to my husband’s family than the farmhouse where we used to live.

I started running again for the first time since college and have signed up for a 10K in February.

I started hiking by myself a few times a month and cherish that solitude in nature.

In August, we enrolled all three girls in a hybrid school model (part traditional school, part homeschool). This fits our family culture far better than I could have ever dreamed and makes me feel like I am truly getting to know my daughters in an entirely different, more intimate way.

I led my first writing retreat and loved encouraging women and teenage girls to pursue the creativity that makes their hearts come alive.

I signed up for a doula class, so that one day I can stand in the gap for single mothers while they give birth.

We became connected with a new life group and had a wonderful time camping together this fall.

We just spent the sweetest Christmas with my sister-in-law, brother-in-law, nieces, and nephews while they visited from Pennsylvania, and we have plans to visit them in a few months.

Though, at first, I’d believed 2021 was full of fruitlessness and loss, sifting more deeply I can see that the Lord has been leading our family each step of the way. I am grateful for another year of growth, even during disappointment, for sometimes through the barren land some of the hardiest fruit is born.

How was 2021 for you? Was it full of drought or abundance? Or both?