A Fruitful Halloween
Another area we can lose our fruitfulness is by going it alone. Being fruitful is sharing abundance. Holidays aren’t meant to be celebrated alone. Sure, parts of them can be solo, like everyone’s different levels of horror tolerance may lead one person to watch their horror alone, or their cheese alone, or read their favorite books alone; but we can’t allow that aspect of the celebration to turn into total disconnection, isolation, only engaging online, or going places where no one knows you so you don’t have to connect. To be fruitful is to engage with your immediate community – family, neighbors, church, etc. – accepting both the joy of this and the accountability.
Production vs. Fruitfulness
Fruitfulness has a garden feel. Gardens are seasonal, and each season is fruitful in a different way. When the garden lies fallow, it is still busy, still working, still being fruitful, just not in the same way it is at the height of harvest. This reminds the homemaker that our lives are filled with different seasons: maid, matron, and crone. And even those three seasons of life have mini seasons built into them, just like how often we look at the agricultural wheel. Life has times of build-up and times of rest, times of plenty and times of want, times of inner focus and outer focus. When we speak of our fruitfulness, we remind ourselves that life changes and each of those changes has different work and different blessings.
Productivity: Using Gifts and Talents
When we invest in our gifts and use them to produce goods, we get a return. Money in an IRA is going to get you more of a return than money hidden in your mattress. Gifts used will yield a higher return than our gifts unacknowledged, untrained, and set aside. What does a return look like? Calmer homes, happy husbands, trained children, healthy churches, and stable communities.
Holiday Productivity
Productivity is better measured by the love of our traditions not the number of them. It is measured by the delight and wonder of our people not the number of parties we rush to. It’s measured by the joy and enjoyment of food, not by how much food. It is measured by our hearts not our stuff.
Productivity
Productivity is abundance, and abundance can be found in many places. Maybe the first place we should start is by seeking to love abundantly and to have an abundance of good attitudes.