Fruits of the Spirit and Dormancy

I've been mulling over the "fruits of the spirit" lately, and recently had my whole study turned on its ear by a close friend who has studied literal fruit-growing in an orchard. I've been thinking about when you feel distant from God and not really "connected" and how that fits in with it, and my friend's information really helped me a lot.

Real fruit-bearing trees will have some years when they produce a lot of fruit... but during those years, they don't do any growing. Or not very much, anyway.

During the years that they do a lot of growing, they don't produce much fruit.

Not only that, but they need the winters, the dark, cold times when they're not producing OR growing much... in order to start growing again in the spring. If they don't have that dark, cold, dormant time, they won't be fruitful later on. There is no fruit tree in the world that produces fruit and grows all year round. God just didn't make them that way.

Fruit-growing comes in seasons of dormancy, fruit, and growth. Jesus lived in an agrarian society, and it is very likely the people he was preaching to, knew this. We have moved away from that sort of society for the most part now, and lost touch with what fruit-growing is really all about... and when our spiritual walk is compared to fruit-growing, we can sometimes feel very disheartened because we're not perfectly-producing Christians all year round. We do get times of discouragement, depression... and dormancy. But the thing to remember is that, in order to continue growing and bearing fruit, we NEED those periods of dormancy.

I know from experience, and from my husband's example, that a long period of feeling spiritually discouraged and disconnected frequently results in a whole lot of growth in a short span of time, once that period is over.

I found this thought very encouraging, and hoped some of my readers might like it as well.