What I Thought Was Wasted

Since January I've shared some of the darkest seasons of my life here on Facebook. Times when everything was falling apart. When the darkness crept in.

Pain. Hopelessness. Worry. Illness. Fear. The feeling of being let down and thrown under the bus.

Back when I was standing in the middle of it, I couldn't see anything in it at all. No joy. No fruit. No life. It just felt like waste. Like death in the pot.

They were moments I wasn't proud of. Moments I would rather forget.

But something incredibly encouraging has happened.

The seasons I experienced as the worst imaginable are the ones that have now brought the most life to you who read along. They've released a budding hope, joy and freedom.

What I imagined would be the most useless and barren, God has turned into hope in the middle of your life. In the middle of discouragement. In the middle of it all.

I've read all your comments. Every message you've written to me personally. Thank you to the 100+ people who over the summer have come up to me across the Danish summer and met me with your encouragement. There have been many, and I'm deeply grateful for every single one.

Jesus says it in a way I recognize from my own life:

„Hvis ikke et hvedekorn bliver lagt ned i jorden og dør, så bliver det aldrig til mere end det ene korn. Men hvis det dør, vil det bære megen frugt.” (Joh 12,24 — BPH)

That's exactly how it's gone.

All the times there was death in the pot. All the times worry and darkness left their heavy mark. Those are precisely the days that now bear fruit in others.

The seed that lies buried looks dead. But it isn't wasted. It's about to bear fruit.

I found myself thinking of Viktor Frankl.

He sat in a Nazi concentration camp. Hunger, cold, death everywhere. Everything was taken from him. And yet he discovered something no guard could touch: a freedom inside himself.

In the middle of the inhuman, he imagined that after the war he stood in a warm, well-lit lecture hall teaching his students about the very thing he was going through now. For a moment he stepped out of the camp and into a future where the pain had become something others could learn from.

Frankl put it like this: you can take everything from a person except one thing — the freedom to choose your attitude, no matter what you're standing in.

In a way he was more free than his captors. Because they were bound by their hatred. He was not bound by his darkness.

And that says something to you.

In the middle of your darkness. In the middle of your hopelessness. There, where you think nothing good could ever come of it, that it can't be used for anything at all — right there, God can meet you.

What looks like waste can be a seed laid in the ground. Not to die, but to bear fruit you can't yet see.

But before the fruit comes, the seed has to sprout and grow. Deep down in the soil, where no one can see it. Maybe it looks as though nothing is happening at all. Maybe it feels as though everything is just lying still.

But it isn't. It's sprouting. It's growing. The fruit is on its way.

Thank you to all of you who have written, commented and shared your own. What I thought would be useless, God has turned into joy and hope. Not just for me, but for you.

Is there a seed in your life you thought was dead?

What if it's actually sprouting, and in time will bear fruit?

What gets buried in the darkness is not always lost. Sometimes it just hasn't broken through yet.