There is no disappointment like sitting in the dirt.

Knee-deep in mud and glaring straight into the pain of barrenness brings an incomparable grief. Sometimes it feels like that’s all you’ve ever known, and when it fills your entire frame of vision, there’s only one option.

Stand up and step back.

When you do, you will see that you stand before a harvest.

It was the dirt and the mud that made this ground rich enough to produce crops that stretch farther than your vision can hold. You will see its richness came from every pain and every heart ache you have ever known. You will see how it has grown the seeds of love in you, ones that know the risk of giving your heart, and that still give it anyway.

In the way you are able to forgive and in the way you are able to return, you will see you are standing in a field of harvest.

You are surrounded by more than your belly could ever consume. You have produced something that will feed every person that walks into your life.

You stand before a harvest when you look into your own heart.

Abundance leaks from your veins. There are seeds and seeds of redemption that have been sown into every crook and crevice of your being since before you were even born.

You’ve got love down inside of you that knows how to hold its ground and how to let it go. You’ve been cultivating a garden that can grow the kind of love that will nourish the nations, and you’ve got the heart to give it away. Because you know in your bones and in your ligaments, even when you’re worn, that you’re giving from what you’ve been given.

You were born to give away the love that made you, the love that was always too big for you to hold for just yourself.

So when someone steals from your grain, or they pluck every last piece you seem to possess, know that you pull from an endless garden of grace. There won’t be anything that can be taken from you that you cannot let go of with joy, because redemption won’t fail to spring up in your fields! They cannot take one single thing from you that your Father won’t hand back to you. He is the finder of lost things, the Father who multiplies the lack, who brings the dead things back to life again.

I hope you really know that.

When you only want to wrap your arms around what you’ve lost, hold on. Because joy is going to well up inside of you and you’re going to be handing out your harvest by handfuls. Oh, you’ve got mounds and piles of love! You’ve got enough to go around, even to your enemies.

Your field has got some stalks that Jack ain’t ever even thought about climbing.

You’re going to feed the multitudes with your fields of favor because your Father doesn’t withhold. So lift your eyes from the dirt. There is more here than what your eyes currently see. When your eyes finally adjust you will see that the times of pain and plowing have caused you to be standing in a field of abundant harvest.