Much Food is in the Fallow Ground of the Poor

Proverbs 13: 20

I’ve been reading Proverbs daily now for the last couple of years. It started from a suggestion by Steven K. Scott in “The Richest Man Who Ever Lived – King Solomon’s Secrets to Success, Wealth and Happiness.”

Just to provide a bit of backstory – this is what his mentor Dr. Gary Smalley shared in the Foreword:

Steven had been struggling. He had just lost his sixth job since graduating from college four years earlier. It seemed to him that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep a job for more than a few months. He had even tried starting his own business a couple of times, but both had quickly failed. He wanted to know if I could offer him any suggestions. I asked him to let me think about it overnight, and we could resume our talk in the morning. After praying about it , I had an idea. I gave him a challenge as we ate breakfast. I asked Steve, “How would you like to become smarter than all of your bosses? ….There are 31 days in the month and there are 31 chapter in the biblical Book of Proverbs. Every day, at the start of each day, read the chapter in Proverbs that corresponds to that particular date. Read two chapter s on the last day of months that have only 30 days.”

I took up the challenge.

Now…I did not immediately feel as if anything was happening….that I was getting any wiser… but I stuck with it. Some days I would read and have to read over the chapter because my mind just was not there. At one point I wanted to just be done with it. I am not quite sure what got me to stick with it…perhaps it was the fact that Steve started to get results within two years.

As I started reading this year I noticed that I would have flashes of insight around certain verses and I would make notes . (Smalley did suggest to Steve to read it with a pen and paper at hand so he could make notes about the knowledge and wisdom he would be learning.)

So this verse today, that is the title of this post, got my attention.

Much food is in the fallow ground of the poor.

Fallow land is land that’s left unseeded for a season or more. It hasn’t been cultivated.

This got me thinking about the amount of potential available to us, if we would only plant seeds and cultivate our mind.

We are all “poor” in something…and it manifests as fear, doubt, discouragement, indecision, feelings of extreme weakness and subservience.

But with what we are given, there is much to cultivate. We can all release on a daily basis, a bit of our potential once we plant the right seeds.

In “Your Right to be Rich” Napoleon Hill asks

Can you imagine a negative and a positive frame of mind occupying the same space at the same time? No, you can’t, because it can’t be done.  Did you know that the slightest bit of a negative mental thought is sufficient to destroy your plan, whatever it is?

Greatness, Hill says, is the ability to recognize the power of your own mind – to EMBRACE it and USE it.

Regardless of where you are, there is much “food” if only you would begin to plant seeds of possibility and cultivate your dreams.