Waiting, Weeding and Watering

Hi! We’ve been talking about different seasons in our lives, and in my last blog, I spoke about the parallels we can draw in our spiritual lives with the agricultural seasons. Last time, we discussed ploughing and planting, and this week we’re looking at...

Waiting, weeding and watering

So, once you’ve prepared (or ploughed) the soil of your heart and planted your seeds (invested time and energy), you move into the next phase: I call it ‘waiting, weeding and watering’.

Often, when in a ‘waiting, weeding and watering’ season, we can struggle to hear God when he speaks to us. This can be because these particular seasons are all about hiddenness;  possessing the things of God through faith and learning to walk by the Spirit when, although you know He is with you, you don’t FEEL His presence or hear Him clearly.

These are times when Father strips away all the “external paraphernalia” of your life, and you learn to recognise that He is still at work, despite what you feel and see (or don’t feel and see!). It can look like nothing much is happening ‘on the surface’, just like the sunflower seeds I had planted, which were busy germinating in the soil. In this context, you could say that the children of Israel had an excessively long ‘waiting, wedding and watering’ season – forty years long!!

So, while the seeds are growing under the ground, what do we do? We water these spiritual seeds by praying, studying the Word of God, finding scriptures to anchor us and feed our faith in the area we are ‘sowing into’. We declare His promises over that seed, thank God for His goodness and His faithfulness, and trust Him.

In other words, we don’t give up!

While we wait and water, we can also do some weeding! Pull out the weeds that grow in the soil of our hearts and try to choke the life out of our seeds. Weed out fear, disappointment, unforgiveness, bitterness and impatience. Keep the soil of your heart soft and free of these nasty weeds, and ask Holy Spirit if you need to do some ‘lie busting’ (See blog 32, ‘Going Through the Process).

The hardest part about waiting is that you can’t see the plant growing. To the natural eye, nothing is happening, and so often, that’s when we give up. Those sunflower seeds I planted were busy growing and germinating under the soil, but I thought nothing was happening because I couldn’t see anything, and so I nearly threw them away. We must wait and learn to trust Him for the right time.

The Israelites had an incredibly long ‘waiting’ season, but it was worth it because they got to claim their inheritance in the Promised Land.

I share more about this kind of season in blogs 27-3. However, for the purpose of this blog and if you are in a ‘waiting season’ at the moment, I want to encourage you: DON’T GIVE UP! Trust your heavenly Father to bring forth life from those seeds you have planted and faithfully watched over. Because, if we are faithful to ‘wait well’, soon enough we will see shoots pushing up through the ground – and that leads to the most fun season: harvest!

Harvest time  

This is an exciting season; a time when you see all those seeds you have planted and watered and weeded so diligently come to life! It’s a fruitful time when new things emerge, new relationships are formed, unexpected blessings materialise, promises long outstanding are suddenly fulfilled, and God’s favour can be clearly seen.

It’s a time full of rejoicing, and it’s so important in these harvest seasons to give testimony of what God has done, to encourage others, and so He can ‘do it again’ in someone else’s life. Don’t be like the 10 lepers in Luke 17 who were healed from leprosy by Jesus, but who, apart from one, didn’t come back to thank Him.

One of the potential pitfalls of a harvest season is that we can start to think we made it happen, and pride can enter our hearts. It’s important to stay thankful and humble before God when things are going well, because that keeps the ‘soil of our heart’ moist and ready for the next seeds to be planted.  Remember that He is the only one who can ‘grow the seeds’ that are planted in the soil of our hearts – without Him, we don’t even have a seed to plant! So just be aware of that.

Harvest is a time of celebration and rejoicing, and I want to encourage you to embrace it with all your heart and enjoy it with no sense of guilt or embarrassment. If God is pouring out blessings and favour on your life, receive it with an open and thankful heart.  Remember that if you don’t know how to receive from God, you will have no crown to throw at His feet.

Receive the blessings He is giving you in the harvest season, give glory to your heavenly Father and keep your heart fixed on the Author and Perfecter of your faith, the One who holds the seasons in His hands.

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Until next time ….

Can you think of times in your life when you were in one of these spiritual seasons that parallel the agricultural seasons?

·       Ploughing

·       Seed planting

·       Waiting, weeding and watering

·       Harvest

Think back over them, and recognise God’s goodness in them; how He spoke to you, guided you, encouraged you, and brought you through.

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Nicky Heymans is a published author of The Wilderness Series, a trilogy about Joshua son of Nun’s story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, their forty years of sojourning in the wilderness, and their entry into the land of Canaan. For more details, see Nicky’s website,

https://www.nickyheymansauthor.com/ , or her Facebook page, Nicky Heymans Author.