The Invisible Season

The farmer doesn’t panic during the growing season.

I’ve often thought about business and life through the analogy of the farmer. The Bible has the principle of sowing and reaping throughout the whole thing. 

We’ve all heard the idea that you reap what you sow.
We all know that you can’t have a harvest without planting.

We understand that principle but our culture has lost that practice.

Most of us aren’t farmers and a lot of us don’t even grow gardens anymore. And because of that I think we are out of practice of all the lessons the farmer has to teach us.

One of the biggest life lessons I think we have forgotten is the season between the sowing and the harvest and what it teaches us.

The invisible season.

Think about this, the farmer each year plants the seeds, weeds, waters…and then waits.
Built into their calendar, into their life is an invisible season.

A season where you see nothing but the empty ground.
There is a season where you don’t see any visible signs that anything is working.

And if I am honest…I don’t like that season.
It is way more fun to plant, take action, see the movement, and feel like I am doing something.

Staring at the dirt and waiting is very challenging for me.

These are the seasons where I start questioning things. It’s the season where I wonder if I heard God wrong. If I should be doing something different. If I missed something altogether.

But here is what I am learning:
The invisibility is not accidental.
It's the whole point.

God could have made roots grow above ground but He didn’t.
He made it so roots only grow underground. 

The growth that happens in the invisible season cannot happen any other way.
Because the moment it becomes visible, what you’re depending on changes. You stop depending on God, and you start depending on what you can see in front of you.

It’s the invisible season that keeps the dependence real.

I think Ancient Israel understood this concept because they couldn’t escape it. Their entire spiritual life was built on feast, festivals, and offerings that were all built around the harvest cycles.

And between every harvest cycle was an invisible season. That season for them was not taught as an interruption of their spiritual life but the structure of it.

The gap was not an exception; it was the rhythm their life was formed around every year, every generation.

We have lost that rhythm.

Compare that to the culture we live in.
We love to collapse timeframes.
We literally work to make sure we don’t want to wait.
Cause and effect is instant.

Everything we build is to eliminate the invisible season.

We use a microwave because it’s faster. We take planes because they are faster. We use social media because the feedback is fast. We order same day delivery from Amazon. We order any food we want from Uber eats and have it on our doorstep sometimes in minutes.

When we have to wait it isn’t just an inconvenience, it is a catastrophe.
If you have ever driven behind someone with this mindset you know. 
They are weaving in and out of traffic to buy seconds as though those 5 seconds are a matter of life and death.

But when cause and effect is almost immediate, and when the gap between wanting and receiving has been almost systematically engineered out of our daily experience - any time we don’t experience the immediate it can feel like a malfunction.

It feels like we are doing something wrong.
Like the system is broken.
And we immediately try to “fix” it.

But we aren’t broken.
We are just unpracticed.

I am reminded of that every time God’s way takes longer than I think it should. Or when I don’t see the results I thought I would.

God is teaching me to trust him in every season, but it is not my first instinct.

But what I am finding is that inability to live in invisible seasons is costing us spiritual growth.

And if you are a business owner or entrepreneur, the same invisible seasons that help us grow spiritually can also exist to help us grow into the calling God has for us.

But because our culture has taken us out of practice of the invisible season, we most often want to rush the very season we need for growth.

The entrepreneur who cannot hold the gap will manufacture a solution before the season is finished. Not out of defiance. Out of inexperience with the process. They have never planted enough seasons to know that the empty field is not the final word about the field. So they act. They pivot too soon. They abandon what was planted before the roots had time to form. And they wonder why the next thing doesn't hold either.

Shallow roots produce fragile fruit. In farming. In business. In faith.

The invisible season isn't just meant to be uncomfortable and get through. It is the essential formation process. The fruit cannot grow without it. The calling cannot hold the weight of the harvest without the root system the invisible season produces.

Our culture is teaching us to skip the very season that makes us capable of carrying what comes next.

The farmer doesn't panic because he knows the process.

Not because he can see what is happening underground. He can't. The ground looks as empty to him as it does to everyone else. He doesn't panic because he has planted enough seasons to know that the empty field is not the final word about the field. He trusts the process because he trusts the one who designed it.

That is what we have lost. Not just patience. The practiced, embodied, seasonal knowledge that the invisible is not the same as the absent.

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that anytime God is quiet, anytime we don’t see results, anytime things are invisible…I must have done something wrong.

We spend so much time looking at what we did or didn't do that we forget to take our eyes off ourselves and look at God.

Look at His character.
His faithfulness.
His mercies.

The invisible season does not mean He has stopped working. It means He is working where you cannot see…in the ground, in the root system, in the formation that has to happen underground before the weight of the harvest can be held.

If you are in an invisible season right now, it is okay to recognize that it is hard. It is okay that it is uncomfortable. But here is what I keep coming back to:

It is not always because you did something wrong.
It is not a season to just get through.
It is the season where real growth happens.

The roots are forming.
The farmer is not panicking.
Neither should you.