Seasons: Part 1

Seasons: Part 1

I stare out my window and behold the darkened sidewalks and damp grass, the bowed tree branches and the pregnant, gray sky. My window is still glossy from the remnant splatter of Heaven blessed rain. I pray that the clouds would shake their mane just a little longer. I’m pretty sure that the gaunt foliage matches my hope.

The dry, hot weeks of summer had made me giddy with visions that I lived in a desert oasis in California and that I only need drive a short distance to reach the exotic coastline. But when the ominous dust clouds rolled into town and the air sagged with the bitter exhale of thousands of hectares of land being swallowed by fire, I joined the lament across the Canadian provinces – We need rain… please!

And here it is. Splashed out on the pavement, the redemption song of every farmer and the moan of every suburban wife trying to perfect her tan. And I’m sure even my stereotype of a woman was at one point praying for some sort of reprieve from the sticky sweat of the days before. Can I get an amen?

Now from my comfortable condo view, I push the clouds further north with many gazes and wishes. As I looked up into the heavy hang and breathed in the damp oxygen, I exhaled a ‘but why’ and here is where an epiphany pushed me into the preverbal ocean. You see I really didn’t need the rain as much as I knew my family of gardeners, farmers, and bushwhackers did. But I got it and they didn’t. Let me just say, God likes to take me on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ rabbit hole adventures. My mind could simply be wishing against a quite needed blessing or looking inside a rather ordinary hollow, and then I fall in and get far more than I ever expected. The little paradigm that pushed me in: why did I get what I wanted when someone else who needed ‘it’ more didn’t get it?

I sometimes battle with this question even though I know God has His own agenda and His own plan – which, of course, if we trust and obey Him, we fit into perfectly as well – but, do you ever get that ‘raised eyebrow’ expression when that person gets their healing while that other person who clearly could use a little divine intervention is passed on by. Or are they?

I love how God rectifies my quandaries with Biblical prophets. Growing up in church, I would learn and recount the writings of Ezekiel, Micah, Jeremiah and so on, but I love it when Holy Spirit slaps me in the face with a mind blowing revelation in the middle of the complex texts just as I begin to descend into a ‘if I were God’ pit. As I could hear the sound of tires suddenly crushing the newly created pools of water along the road outside my room, I could here the beginning of Isaiah 55: 8-13 echo in the Sunday school hallways of my brain. Here is where ‘Alice’ begins to dive quite a bit faster.

My intentions are not always yours, and I do not go about things as you do. My thoughts and My ways are above and beyond you, just as heaven is far from your reach here on earth. For as rain and snow can’t go back once they’ve fallen, but soak into the ground and nourish the plants that grow, providing seed to the farmer and bread for the hungry, so it is when I declare something. My word will go out and not return to Me empty, but it will do what I wanted; it will accomplish what I determined. For you will go out in joy, be led home in peace. And as you go the land itself will break out in cheers; the mountains and the hills will erupt in song, and the trees of the field will clap their hands. Prickly thorns and nasty biers will give way to luxurious shade trees, sweet and good. And they’ll remind you of the Eternal One and how God can be trusted absolutely and forever. (VOICE)

These verses blow my mind! Not only with the context of them in Isaiah to address the nation of Israel, but also how Holy Spirit uses them to correct my thoughts towards the Father! Let’s back track a little. How many times have we questioned God’s authority and choice in various matters involving justice and mercy? How many times have we reprimanded the Father for letting the drunk driver live and the innocent family die? Or that employee gets a raise while you don’t? Or that the rapist got off scot-free while the girl has to live out her life bearing deep wounds? Or yet another person makes it into the pool of Siloam while you lay on your mat for thirty years knowing you will never get into the churning water first to be healed because your disease left you crippled and lame while the one who found healing had an illness that wasn’t half as debilitating? Why God!

We don’t really question God, as much as we rather blame Him than actually get an answer do we? I’ve rammed into such a monster of an issue that has spawned so much bitterness and contempt and disillusion in the world, and yet the answer was written plainly over three thousand years ago!

My intentions are not yours. Books have been written about this part of the passage alone. But, if I have ever learned something about God it is that He is love and He created us in our inmost being! Then He stepped into our form to show us how much He truly loves us, and so His intentions, His ways, His thoughts are outside of what we can see or grasp. That is where faith collides with fear. Fear is the belief that love ends. Faith is the belief that love extends far beyond what we can see or believe. So when God says that His intentions are not ours and that He does not go about things in the mortal, human way we do, He really means what He says. We were not born with the mind of God; we are the reflection of it. The people around me who demand answers for tough questions overwhelm me and I want to burry my head in the sand when the tornado of doubt stops by for tea. Here is where I feel the most vulnerable and the most human, but I know that as I get to know more about Him through the Word and spend time with Him in prayer and worship and in community with others, I get to know Him. And what the bottom line of His heartbeat is.

His intentions far amass my own. When I look out my window and wish the clouds to an area where houses are burning and people are putting their lives on the line, I become so small when I realize I didn’t make those clouds and the rain that is within them. So instead of making my intentions known to God, I make my intentions about God. When I see a child rapist get parole, instead of making my intentions known to God – why God! What a sick human - I try to push past my mortality and make my intentions about God – to love (not agree), to reflect mercy (not passivism) and justice (not tolerance). It is such a difficult, heavy topic. It swirls around our world like a hurricane in spring. And I, only a fragile leaf within it.

I know the brown grass outside my window would not return the rain back to the clouds. It really did need the rain. And I know that God’s loving-kindness is like the dew. It does return to Him unused. I love how God reveals His amazing love through a horticulture picture: rain falls from the sky and soaks into ground where the crops drink it in and then the fields mature and produce seed and that seed is harvested to make bread to feed the hungry. From the pit of our problem, God has already mapped out a course that will not only lead us out of the hole, but eventually will give us the tools to fill in the pit. The season that you're in is probably the process of which God is using to heal that very need your heart aches towards.

The seasons of my life lately have been rather uneventful, and I even label them as ‘dumb’, nonsensical, teary, and hormonal as I reflect on them. I don’t get the process or the reason right off the bat and even why it’s a ‘season’ to go through – but God does. He knows that I am being perfected in them. Who knows, maybe my neighborhood could have ignited in smoke today had not the rain fallen? Maybe God is watering you in an ‘odd’ area in order to make you stronger for an impending season that could be right around the corner or in a decade of time. When I taught Kindergarten, we studied what plants need to grow and watched with great expectation as our own little garden poked its head out of the soil. Some plants grew like a fairytale and some never even cracked the surface. I reckoned that one of the main problems what that the unyielding seeds didn’t get enough water. Now, the whole metaphor of plants and gardening is a very deep one that I will save for another time, but the point of it, is that we need the rain to grow.

So, then do not consider those seasons of gray, boring days as wasted time because then we discredit what God was doing in those seasons. We may never honestly realize how valuable the rainfall was until we are in the thick of the smoke. So let the rain soak into you and nourish you so that you may produce seed and that seed will be able to feed those around you. God takes us from being a backbencher to a leader in these times.

Have you ever wondered why God leads you through seasons both rough and weird where you experience Him as… provider, comforter, healer, father, husband, teacher, and so on? Let’s say you are in a season where you need encouragement about who you are in Christ more than before. God lavishes His encouragement on you in different ways and builds you up in His character as an encourager. So now when the storm of discouragement comes to you again or to someone else, it is then that you will know how to manifest God as the Encourager to be seen by the world.

The word of the Lord will not return void. It will not come back to Him empty and without effect. Instead it will affect you and those around you and you will go out in joy and be led home in peace! What a promise. Let the presence of the Lord in the season that you are in affect you because then you will go out in joy and be lead in peace. Who doesn’t want that? If you say different, then, what season are you in? I wish you could see the smirk of honestly on my face right now, friend.

When we respond to the stretching, molding, teaching, and convicting of God in our lives, we are not the only ones who change – we affect the entire atmosphere! Isaiah says that the landscape changes and sings a new tune, and that the environment rejoices with us. Even the prickly thorns and briers give way to an oasis of change. The evil things that surround us submit to the attitude of obedience and trust we manifest in our lives. The season that you are in may be a Sahara desert of a season and you may have been in it for years. Have you ever asked why, beloved? Isaiah recounts God saying that once the water soaks into the ground to produce seed that is when the situation changes.

Listen, I am not chiding you or accusing you of anything. You are a warrior and a child of the God of the universe. But, even the Apostle Paul who was under house arrest for the later part of his life reflects the prophet in his letters to the churches: Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear. (Philippians 1:12-14 NIV)

Paul directs what Isaiah writes, that the season will remind you of God and how He can be trusted absolutely and forever. No question. No blame. No shame. God allows things to happen – after all we are of free will – but, no matter what season you find yourself in or you witness another person going through, be ever so keenly aware not to lower God to a point where He is on par with sin… “God wanted it to happen”, “God needed your child in heaven”, “God gave you the cancer”, “and God wants you to feel lonely in order for you to get closer to Him”. No. No, no, no. I heard Christian author, speaker, and singer Christa Black Gifford once speak at a conference the following after the death of her daughter:

“God didn’t give you sickness to raise faith in you or patience in you, He gave humanity free will to choose, and the results of sickness have splashed throughout history and we live here, and we are all susceptible and know that Christ was preordained before sin even came to earth to die for you if it came to that because He loves you. It is God's will for all to be saved and healed. Jesus knew the will of the Father and He died as a result of love, but He also rose to life because of love. Regardless of the state you are in, you were made for life. Do not join the Accuser in accusing God because you are in pain. When we say God allowed it to happen, we assume that God approved it to happen. Did God allow pain to happen? Yes. The tree gave access to death and pain, but God did not approve of this. He loves us so much to give us free will… God is a God of life, and you love Him to death because He is good.”

My God is a God of love. My God is a God of joy. My God is a God of justice. My God is a God of mercy and “if you know His nature, you will not question His motives” (Melissa Hesler, 2015). My God allowed it to rain today. I can hear the happy little birds in the trees outside my comfort. I can feel the huge sigh of relief from the fire fighter and mother and farmer and gardener today. God may break open the skies over those who don’t realize how much they need it and He may also send rain to fall above the fires and cracked soil where the need is great. Either way, my God remains good. Always.

I can’t speak for the mother who holds her dead baby or the father who is handed a pink slip or the child who is clinging to life in the hospital as some hellish disease rips through little organs. For some, today may be the end of a long season, others the start of one. For some, it may be their last season before they leave this world, and for others, it may be a numbing first. For some, it may be a compounding season upon season and for others, it may be that they have baked the bread and are ready to hand it out to those in need. Regardless, where do we fix our eyes?

For those in my area, He answered prayer for rain and most of them won’t even bat an eyelash in thanks towards Him. But, I will fix my eyes on Him for it. Thank you. God sees and perhaps where I am right now just happens to be the seed growing strong to be milled into flour for the bread that will feed someone else.

The prophet Habakkuk writes during the desolation of his country a desert song; a pool to drink from for those who are in that dry, sticky sweat, chaffed lips, tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth season. Be encouraged by it, because these seasons are real. As you read it, hear the pitter-patter of rain hit the ground at your feet: Though the fig tree does not bud and there are not grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights. (Habakkuk 3:17-19)

Thank You, God that I don’t understand all of Your ways. Thank You for reminding me of how trustworthy You are. I don’t get half of what I comprehend, but I know that You are a God of love and my best interests are at the forefront of Your mind. I trust you. I love you. Be the rain that grows a resilient seed within me; one that will produce witness and testimony to Your great name. Amen.