You’re Not Waiting. You’re Farming.

When It Felt Like Silence
Early in our marriage, Vic and I found ourselves in a financial hole we’d dug one necessary purchase at a time. Credit card debt, tight margins, and the kind of low-grade anxiety that follows you into every conversation and sits with you when you’re trying to sleep.

I prayed a lot during that season, honest, desperate prayers, asking God to help us find a way out. And for a long time, it felt like silence.

What made it harder was that I couldn’t talk about it with Vic without him withdrawing. So I stopped bringing it up. I carried it quietly, ran the numbers alone at night, and told myself I just needed to figure it out.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in that, sitting next to someone you love and feeling completely alone in a problem.

So I made a plan. We cut what we could, skimmed down, and started chipping away at the debt one payment at a time. Slow. Unglamorous. There were months where it felt like nothing was moving.

And if I’m honest, what I was really trying to control wasn’t just the budget. I was trying to control whether we were going to be okay.

That’s an exhausting thing to carry.

The Kind of Patience That Works
James 5 has something to say about this.

Writing to a church under pressure, James points them and us to a farmer. It’s an interesting choice. Farmers are not passive people. They break ground, plant seed, tend what’s growing, and show up every day whether they feel like it or not.

But there is one thing a farmer simply cannot do. Make it rain.

The farmer works with discipline and waits with trust because they understand whose hands hold the weather.

That’s the tension James is holding out for us. Not passive waiting. Not anxious controlling. Something harder than both, faithful tending with open hands.

What’s your job?
Show up.
Do the work in front of you.
Plant the seed you’ve been given.
Be faithful in the small and ordinary things.

What’s not your job?
The rain.
The timing.
The outcome.
The results you can’t manufacture no matter how hard you grip.

When the Weight Leaks Out
James also notices something else, something worth sitting with. He says, almost in the same breath as his call to patience, don’t grumble against one another.

That’s not a random addition. He’s connecting dots.

When we try to carry what was never ours to carry, the weight doesn’t stay internal. It leaks. It creates distance. It makes us harder to be around, not because we’re bad people, but because we’re crushed under something we were never designed to hold alone.

I know something about that.

The Slow Work of Trust
The shift for Vic and me didn’t come dramatically. There was no moment where everything suddenly made sense. It came slowly, one week at a time, one small provision at a time.

Food on the table.
A roof over our heads.
A car from generous friends when we needed one.

And gradually, something began to loosen in me.


We weren’t getting the miracle I’d been praying for. We were getting something quieter, daily bread in the most literal sense.

And eventually, a generous gift from Vic’s parents came at just the right moment and cleared the last of it.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe, fifteen+ years on.


The grinding, unglamorous, nothing-seems-to-be-moving middle wasn’t God’s silence.

It was the growing season.

I just couldn’t see it from inside it.

Vic and I came through that stretch too, not quickly and not without help. We did the work. We’re better for it. But it was a long road, and there were no shortcuts.

If This Is Where You Are
Maybe you’re in a field right now that doesn’t look like much.

Maybe you’ve been praying prayers that feel like they’re disappearing into the ceiling.

Maybe you’re carrying something alone that was never meant to be carried that way, running the numbers at midnight, trying to hold everything together, waiting for a sign that any of it is working.

Can I tell you what I wish someone had told me?

You’re not behind.
You’re not forgotten.
You’re not being punished by silence.


Your job is to tend the field in front of you. Show up today. Do the faithful thing.

Release the image of what you think this should look like by now, and pay attention to what God is actually providing.

The rain is His. It always was.

And He hasn’t forgotten how to grow things.