Freedom Friday: Embracing Unproductivity and Preparing for Your Season of Fruitfulness

Hello everybody and welcome once again to the unlearned podcast. I'm your host, ruth Abigail, aka RA, and this is Freedom Friday, where me, or me and a friend of mine, come and share something we've unlearned this week and how it has made us just a little bit more free. So, for those of you who are not, in Florida, california, texas, maybe Oklahoma and other states that are warm, the rest of us are experiencing winter. Right, we are in cold weather. I love winter, I love fall. I'm definitely that person who gets really excited about sweatshirts and sweaters and all that, and I also get really excited about breaks and holidays and all that stuff. Right, but the thing that's difficult for me about the winter season a lot of times is, even though I like a good break, it's hard for me to stop. Right, I am really I struggle with stopping, and those of you who have been listening for a while know that is one of my biggest things. It's hard for me to stop, and so I've been thinking a lot about seasons lately and it's really interesting to notice the different what are the different patterns of the different seasons? Right and fall, and winter. There's not a lot of growth happening. There's actually shedding happening. Leaves are falling, right. There is not any producing thing going on on trees, right. Everything is taking a break, and I think it's really interesting in these moments when we're able to see how life is mirrored through the actual seasons, because we're created by the same God, by the same creator. It's not strange, or shouldn't be strange, that our existence a lot of times can be in sync with the seasons, right? And when I say in sync, I'm not saying things happen exactly at the same time, but there's similar cycles. You can sense that we go through the same things, that the cycles of seasons go through. We have seasons of productivity and fruitfulness, and we have seasons where things are falling off and we're shedding. Here's the beautiful thing about falling off, shedding seasons, right Fall and winter. The beautiful thing about that is that rest is a part of that process. When trees aren't producing, the roots are resting, they're not doing much, and I love how I read it recently. How I read it recently. Trees actually adapt to the season of winter in a way that conserves their energy so that they have enough to produce what needs to be produced in the spring and summer, and I wonder how many of us can actually relate to that and take advantage of those moments. It's you know, some moments we have are moments where God is shedding things, where life is shedding things, where we are getting rid of things and we're not producing, we're not being productive, we are letting go and we're resting. And if you're anything like me, I will miss those moments and try to stay consistently producing and productive and miss the moments where things are being shed and where I need to rest. And that's where burnout comes in. We have to be willing to go through those seasons of rest and shed, getting rid of letting go, so that when the cycle of productivity comes back around, you'll have enough energy stored up to actually meet those moments. Well, my struggle is that I don't like to be unproductive. I falsely believe that if I'm not productive I'm not useful. I don't know if that's something that you also struggle with. If it is, it's a lie that both of us have to kill. Just because you're not being productive does not mean you're useless. It means that you're preparing for the next season, preparing for your season of fruit. But if you try to force yourself to be productive in a season where you should be resting, then you run the risk of missing the right season for produce, the right season for fruitfulness, and it will not produce as much as it could. And I definitely have to unlearn that being unproductive means being useless. It means sometimes, instead of being productive, I need to prepare and during this particular season, like built into my world is a nice break, and I need to take advantage of that and just stop and prepare, because I know that season of fruit, a season of produce, a season of plenty is coming. It's on the way and I want to be ready for it and I don't want to be so tired that I can't produce when it's time to produce. So unlearn that. Unlearn that being unproductive means being useless. If you're not productive right now, focus on preparation and get ready for a fruitful season. That's on the way. Hope that helps. Until next Friday. Let's keep unlearning together so we can experience more freedom. We'll see you then, peace. Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode. Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think. We're looking for it the next time, when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom. See you then.