Fruitful: When You Don’t Feel It

I chose fruitful as my word this year, and now, halfway through, I don’t feel it.

There’s no big harvest I can point to. No breakthrough. No clear sense of forward movement.
Honestly, it’s felt flat. Dormant. Like standing still in a season that was supposed to grow something.

Some days I think of fruit-bearing trees—how they stand bare for long stretches. No blossoms. No green. Just branches and waiting. I know dormancy is part of their process, part of how they survive and come back stronger. But I didn’t expect my year to feel like that.

I wanted fruitful to mean full. Productive. Evident.

But fruitfulness isn’t always visible. Sometimes the work happens underground—where roots go deeper and the soil does its hidden work. There’s no praise for roots. But without them, nothing above the surface lasts.

I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ words in John 15: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.” He never said fruit would appear instantly—or that we’d always see it. He just said: remain.

Abide.

Stay connected.

That’s hard when things feel quiet or uncertain. But maybe staying with God when we don’t see results is part of what fruitfulness looks like. Not measured in outcomes, but in trust. Not in big visible change, but in faithfulness—prayer by prayer, breath by breath.

I keep coming back to Galatians 6:9: “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Not if we do enough or if we get it right, but if we don’t give up.

So no, this year hasn’t looked fruitful. But maybe it’s still becoming something.

Maybe the roots are growing deeper than I can see. Maybe God is planting something that takes longer than I expected.

And maybe this part counts, too.