Proverbs 24:16—“The righteous may fall seven times but still get up…”

Genesis 26:1, 12— “There was a famine in the land…then Isaac sowed in that land, and reaped in the same year a hundredfold.”

When I first arrived in Kincaid, Saskatchewan as a newly-ordained minister, farmers filled me in on what had happened a few months earlier. The spring rains did not come on time. However, high velocity dry winds did, and swept away the top soil as well as the newly planted seeds.
They were faced with a dilemma. Repeating the seeding process would double input costs such as fuel and grain and result in reduced income, if the yield turned out to be only average. On the other hand, these seeds could never germinate or produce a poor harvest, which would lead to further losses. It was a risky business.

To seed or not to seed, that was the question.

To their credit, virtually everyone who faced this predicament opted to re-seed. So here I am, expecting a month of dry heat with virtually no rain. Much to my surprise, it rained barn cats and prairie dogs!  With lots of sun and very little rain in August, heads of grain were bulkier than normal. To make a long story short, farmers were treated to a bumper harvest as fields that normally yielded 25-30 bushels per acre on the average produced nearly twice that amount!

How did this come about?

You see, when the seed was planted, even though there was no water from above, there was still moisture below the soil. Because of the arid conditions, the roots had to go further and grow longer than normal. Thus the plants got rooted more deeply than they would in a typical year. When the rains came in July and the roots got their fill, they went on a growth spurt that was nothing short of phenomenal. Since the root structure was deeper, the stalks could grow taller and support heavier heads of grain than normal, leading to a higher than average yield.

What happened to wheat that summer has been repeated in my life many times over the past three decades of ministry. There have been dry periods of discouragement when it looked as though the seeds I planted had disappeared. Yet, when I re-seeded, I reaped more abundant blessings than ever before.

Can you relate to those Saskatchewan farmers in the Spring of 1982? Have your seeds been swept away? Don’t get down, give up or recede. Instead, get up, get busy and re-seed. Then get ready to receive a greater yield.