Learning Abundance After Seasons of Lack

Author: Farmer Kelley

You may not know this, but my Dad was a Baptist Minister. I grew up singing in the junior choir, ringing the church bells and teaching Sunday School. It seems like a lifetime ago that traditional religion was such an integral part of my everyday life.

Every so often I get a twinge of “heavenly guilt” thinking my Dad would be disappointed in my holiday-only church participation. Then there are moments on the farm when faith feels less like belief and more like breath. Like the fields and paddocks and barn are a church and tending the land and my animals is as sacred as any steepled building can be.

This morning, the sky was pale and wide, the kind of soft blue that only comes after a long stretch of gray. The herd moved quietly toward their hay, and for a moment everything felt held—by something far beyond my fences and careful planning.

I have known seasons when that feeling was harder to find.

Times when the bills stacked high, when the weather wouldn’t cooperate, when prayers felt like they rose no higher than the barn rafters. In those years, faith felt more like discipline than comfort. Something I chose because I needed to, not because I felt it.

And then, without fanfare, it returns.

Not as certain.

Not as answers. But as a steady undercurrent.

A sense that I am not carrying this alone.

I think many of us come back to faith differently than we held it in our youth. It is less rigid. Less performative. More intimate. We have lived enough to know we are not in full control—and strangely, that softens us.

On the land, renewal doesn’t announce itself loudly. The grass does not shout when it begins to grow again. It simply responds to light.

Perhaps renewed faith is the same.

It is waking one morning and realizing you feel supported. It is noticing gratitude where there used to be fear. It is trusting that even the fallow seasons were doing quiet work beneath the surface.

Out here, I still mend fences. I still balance accounts. I still plan for storms. But I do it now with an open hand instead of a clenched one.

If faith has been finding its way back to you—gently, quietly—I would love to hear what it feels like in this season of your life.

With calm confidence in what we cannot always see,

Farmer Kelly

PS: Check out @karladavismusic on Instagram – I love her take on the hymns I grew up with.