Lent: What Might God Be Growing Under the Surface?

There’s a field near where I live that, for a lot of the year, looks like nothing much is happening. Especially in winter. It’s just there, brown, muddy, quiet. No crops. No movement. Nothing to get excited about.

If you didn’t know better, you might think it was being wasted.

But the farmer knows something I don’t always remember. This is not empty time. The soil is resting. Recovering. Getting ready. What looks like nothing is actually the slow work of preparation.

Lent feels a bit like that.

So often we live life at full speed. We’re encouraged to keep going, keep producing, keep proving that we’re doing something worthwhile. Even in church, it’s easy to feel that pressure. More people, more activity, more visible signs that we’re doing okay.

Lent gently invites us to stop pushing quite so hard.

Jesus once said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.” It’s a strange image, but a hopeful one. Because it reminds us that what looks like loss or ending is often the place where something new begins.

I think this matters for our rural churches.

Many of us know what it’s like to feel tired. To look at small numbers, ageing congregations, or buildings that need more love than we have energy for, and quietly wonder if we’re running out of road. It’s easy to feel like we’re failing.

But what if this season isn’t about failure at all?

What if it’s more like that field in winter?

What if God is doing something deeper than we can see right now, growing roots, reshaping hearts, making space for something new?

Lent gives us permission to stop pretending everything is fine, and instead to sit honestly with God in the quieter, messier places of life. The places where things feel uncertain. The places where faith feels thinner than we’d like.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly where God loves to work.

So this week, you might like to ask yourself
What might God be quietly growing in me, even if I can’t see it yet?