Long Term Barrenness

is not God’s Final Answer

My Backyard Prophetic Sign

FB showed me a picture and an article I posted on June 7 2025 June 7. It is somewhat of a mission statement and what has been like a prophetic sign to me in my own backyard. After 27 years of barrenness, my fig tree has been bearing fruit the last two years. My expectations are that reality will soon catch up to the backyard sign of my fig tree. The first picture is the fig tree on June 7, 2025 and the second picture was taken June 7 2026. This year there is even more figs loaded on that tree than last year. The barren years are over.

Tending the Fig Tree

Whoever tends the fig tree shall eat its fruit. Proverbs 27:18

by Donna Diorio

June 6 2025: As I write this on Tuesday morning with my coffee, I am eating a giant fig from my fig tree. For the first time since I planted it in 1998, it has finally produced fruit, and it is fruit in abundance! Most years it produced absolutely no fruit whatsoever.

Several times I concluded it was not planted in the right place to get the sun it needed. Even when we left the apartment and moved into this house in 2003 I had to replant it at least three times trying to find the place it would thrive.

It has been in the same location now for over a decade, a perfect spot but it continued not to produce fruit that could be eaten. Twice two bitter winters leveled it to the ground, but it grew back stronger, and even produced 3 or 4 figs we could eat.

Every year my fig tree was a spiritual sign to me and not a good one. I was going nowhere fast for all my hard work and the hardship of doing my Israel prayer mailing lists. The trickle of fruitfulness seemed to mock me in that barren fig tree, but I could not quit knowing the promises of God toward the abundant spiritual restoration of Israel.

What I saw in my fig tree was not unlike the things I’ve heard from Israeli ministries at times. The promises of God inspire great hope of what He is doing among us, but the day-to-day reality is depressing if we let feelings rule us. We are waiting for something BIG. We know it is out there, it is coming, but here we are with not a lot to show for it.

Oftentimes that fig tree in my backyard has felt something like a prophetic slap to me! Many times after another disappointing season tending that fig tree, I thought about just giving up, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t give up on my fig tree just like I couldn’t give up on advocating for the body of believers in Israel.

The fig tree in the Bible is a prophetic symbol of Israel, and my backyard fig tree symbolized my own sense not accomplishing my purpose with the Weekly Summary and Arrows from Zion to reach and teach Christians about our duty to the body of believers in Israel. If anything I was steadily losing ground.

Always there has been so much resistance and so many challenges to doing my ministry letters. These past few years have been painful not seeing any breakthrough or the growth I have always expected.

I have read the same sense from Israeli ministries wondering, ‘When does the breakthrough begin in earnest? Where is the abundant fruit?’ We have great expectations in our hearts from all of God’s promises in His Word, yet there is little fruit on the fig tree – certainly not as we expect the harvest to produce.

Today I read that the age of a fig tree is a determining factor if it is not producing fruit. In the past I assumed that meant the fig tree can get too old. Old age is not issue! The age factor is about a fig tree maturing enough to produce seeds.

The fig tree expert wrote that the trees “need to reach a certain maturity before they can produce offspring. Fruit is how a fig tree creates seeds. If the fig tree is not old enough to produce seeds, it will also not produce fruit. Typically, a fig tree will not fruit until it reaches two years old, but it can take some trees as long as six years to reach the right maturity. There is nothing you can do to speed up the rate a tree matures at. Time and patience are the only fixes for this.”

A minister I know teaches the same thing about the timing of Jesus return to earth. Francis Frangipane teaches that the “times of the gentiles be fulfilled” is not based on numbers of how many have become Christians in the nations. Rather it’s about Christians reaching a spiritual maturity level of Christians. From Ephesians 2:15, I would say that spiritual maturity level would be Christians understanding God’s point of our unity of “one new man” with Jewish believers. This alignment is the most obvious manifestation of our Christian spiritual maturity to enter into family alignment with Israeli Jewish believers in Yeshua.

It is not because Israeli believers in Yeshua are more special than those in the nations, but it is because Christian acceptance of Israel’s spiritual restoration by God makes OUR UNITY the thing that make us together special.

All the promises of God in scripture that He is gathering Jews from the nations back to Israel for the purpose of spiritual restoration have been ignored – seen by not comprehended by Christians. The physical restoration had to come first – the State of Israel. Because of that anti-Semitism that is erupting all over the world has become the driving force for Jews to return to their land of Promise from God.

It takes Christian fruit of maturity to produce the seed for Israeli ministries to sow/plant among their people so “all Israel shall be saved.” It takes the fruit of maturity to produce seed for the Israeli ministries to bear more fruit.

In the spiritual maturity of Christians in the nations toward the spiritual the fig tree of Israeli believers, helping them so they can plant the seed of the Gospel more and more in Israel, this is the maturity of unity that is going to produce fruit in Israel! God is not going to initiate the final harvest until we have reached the peak maturity He is looking for.

My fig tree is 27 years old in 2025! Far beyond what the expert said it should take to produce fruit. But it never did. If it had not become a spiritual sign to me, I would have discarded it years ago and bought a new fig tree. But it was and is spiritual to me. To me it represents my own ministry to the church as I am “tending the fig tree” of Israel.

One of the scriptures I took hold of when in 2005 I started Arrows from Zion after starting the Weekly Summary of Prayer Requests from Israeli Ministries in 2001, is Proverbs 27:18 – “Whoever keeps the fig tree will eat its fruit; So he who waits on his Master will be honored.”

I never knew it before today, but Hebrew word in “Whoever nāṣar (keeps) the fig tree” is 90% the exact same definition as “So he that šāmar (waits) on His Master.” Both mean “to watch, guard, keep, preserve ….watchmen” but added to šāmar (waits) on His Master are to “heed” and “observe.”

The first thing that came to my mind discovering this is that God considers it to be the same thing – those that watch over the fig tree (Israel) by being a watchman guarding over it, to keep and preserve it, God considers that being a loyalty to Himself.

If one watches his Master, heeding and observing his Master, he will also do the same for Israel. Maybe you think that is taking it too far, exalting Israel too much, but exalting Israel is not the point. The point is for each of us to be in an active solidarity with God’s desires, God’s plans and whom God loves.

Year after year my tree and my ministry reflected little fruit. How could anyone take me seriously when there was so much struggle and so little visible fruit? This year my fig tree in the first season of annual harvest times is loaded down with giant luscious figs! Every branch of the tree is loaded down with figs. I see that not only as a prophetic sign of my own ministry finally bearing fruit, ultimately I see it as the promise of God to the spiritual restoration of Israelis beginning to produce abundant fruit the Israeli ministries will begin to reap.

That is exciting to me! The prophetic sign that has tested me for years- would I give up and turn away? – is now is urging me forward in new excitement, new hope and a new burst of trust that God is bringing to pass His good will for Israel and for me. Our destinies are intertwined in Yeshua.

I lift my eyes unto the LORD, and as that fig tree has spoken to me of not giving up in the face of seeming barrenness, but to keep trusting Him that the fruitfulness He promised is surely coming, that fruit tree is speaking good things to me this year: the blessings of fruitfulness in Zion.

For 24 years I have weekly summarized ministries letters from the Israeli Messianic Jewish ministry letters. My mission was to make them known to the Church. Christians mostly have had no idea of the existence of Jewish followers of Yeshua in Israel.

Not only was my mission to make Christians aware of their existence, but also to let Christians know why the body in Israel is significant to Christians worldwide and why we are to help them specifically. It goes far beyond just advocating for the Jewish state. The Israeli believers in Yeshua are significant to the building of the House of Our Lord Jesus, and Israel’s too. Yeshua, Israel’s Messiah King, Deliverer and Savior.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.” Jeremiah 29:11-12