Enjoying the Season!

I went for a walk last week and was enjoying the sounds and colours, the signs of life. I love spring. I was musing with God that actually I love all the seasons, for different reasons.

The budding of spring life, daffodils, the returning birds and the lambs; the long summer days, ice cream, the sounds of children playing outside and smells of hay-making, home grown tomatoes, and strawberries; the glorious colours of autumn trees and crisp, frosty walks in the leaves, and the winter’s joy of an open fire, deep snow, and beautiful starry nights. I could continue with much more. Our Creator does such good work and I love how all my senses are engaged in the appreciation of his creation – the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feel and the taste. Truly a whole body experience! As I pondered the joys of different seasons, the One who is always doing good work IN me, as well as around me, asked me a question:

Do you appreciate all the seasons in your own life?

As is usual with God’s questions, (I guess that’s the point!) it set me thinking. Can I appreciate something, anything, about every season of my life? The reality is that there are things that I don’t like about every season in nature but I tend not to focus on those so much! It is not always the same in my own life.

The season that I am currently in, I have found hard. I am not very good at inactivity and waiting. I like to get on with things. Since God asked me to give up my last job, if I am honest there have been too many days where I am in effect asking God to hurry this season up, looking for a shortcut to jump into the next.

I am well aware that there are those in different times of life who would look at my life and say ‘I would love to be there right now’ and wonder why I am not enjoying every minute. Maybe it is part of our cultural malaise. We are conditioned to look at other’s lives and compare. Social media can feed that desire to “covet my brother’s donkey”, or holiday, or house, or lifestyle, or ministry, or looks, or whatever. The writer to the Hebrews tells us in chapter 13, verse 5:

… be content with what you have …

There are uncomfortable things in every season but do I trust God to bring good out of every season? One thing that helps me is to focus on what I am thankful for right now. Gratitude leads to contentment. Contemplating what I am grateful for in this season helps me keep a sense of focus.

Apart from the dislike of being inactive and the uncertainty about what, if anything, I am supposed to be doing, and the fact that I have pushed some work doors and they have remained shut, I am facing fears about provision, fears and doubts about timing and whether I got it right, to name a few things. In this place of uncertainty, it takes some effort to resist the bombardment of fiery darts from the enemy. It is at times like this that we are more vulnerable to his lies and I have to remind myself to hold on to the truth, to what God has said, and is saying. It is so key to hear his voice every day to counteract the rubbish that seems to float around in my thoughts. Just as we are told in 2 Corinthians 10:5, it is important to

… take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.

This passage in Ecclesiastes 3:1 and following verses, that I have mainly heard quoted at funerals, was one place I turned as I thought about God’s question about appreciating my seasons:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven‬‬

The word ‘season’ in this case means an ‘appointed time’. It is God who appoints those times. He has ordained certain times for certain things. I continued my reading in Psalm 31:15

My times are in your hand; rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!

This encouraged me to remember that I am not in charge. He is the one who manages my timetable. I have used this verse in praying for those who are desperately sick. I used it last year, when my Mum was dying, to declare that the enemy did not get to command the number of her days, God did, but it is also relevant in my day to day. My times are in His hands because I have placed them there. Psalm 139:16 reminds us:

Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

This brings comfort as I consider that God knows all my days already, what they contain, and the decisions I, and others, will make, good and bad. He has ordained my days. He decides the number of them. He knows what I need in order to fulfil his purposes on the earth and He is the one doing any pruning, shaping, moulding and refining, any disciplining, through what happens in my days. He is also the one bringing blessing, encouragement, training and equipping through what happens. He is the one who oversees the process and I have said an unequivocal “yes” to Him and His plans. Verse 11 of the Ecclesiastes chapter encourages me further:

He has made everything beautiful in its time.…

He does good work, he brings beauty from ashes, so even if my days look like ashes (they don’t right now – but they have in the past), I can trust him to bring good from them. As I was reading around the subject of seasons and appointed times, I was reminded of 1 Chronicles 12:32 which tells us of the tribe of Issachar:

… men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do …

If there are appointed times for things, building and planting or tearing down and uprooting, for example, to quote Ecclesiastes 3 again, then it is important to know which season we are in so we don’t try to build when it is time to uproot. It is important to know which season we are in, so we can co-operate with what God is doing and not work against him.

The global church has been in a dismantling process, in a time of shaking and of re-digging of some foundations. It may be time for some to start building again but it is so key to know whether or not that dismantling process is finished. Someone wisely pointed out to me today that there is a sense in which God is always pruning and shaping us and that is true but there are certain seasons where He seems to intensify the process, particularly in times of transition, of crossing over to a new season, like the Israelites going through time of reconsecration and then a time of circumcision, either side of the Jordan river, before the first battle in the promised land at Jericho.

I am reminded of Jesus going into the wilderness before starting his ministry, of Paul spending time in the desert too at the beginning of his ministry. It is a pattern. In this time, despite my temptation to try and shortcut the process somehow, I am reminding myself that the point of it, like it says in Hosea 2:14, is to draw me closer to God. It is a picture of loving kindness, of tenderness, not pain and punishment. It is the kindness of God that brings us to a place of repentance (Romans 2:4)

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.

In this place, chapter 2 in Hosea shows us, God reveals and removes the names of other gods from our lips, strips away the trappings of our idolatry and unfaithfulness and draws us back into a depth of covenant relationship with Him that means we know Him as ‘husband’, rather than ‘master’, (a relationship of covenant commitment, of love and intimacy, not servility and fear), where we know Him as one who turns difficult times into places of hope, and who calls us His people, and who commits Himself to us as our God.

The point of this season is for Him to become “enough”. The Israelites in the desert learned to be dependent on God. He was the one who supplied their every need because there was no other source. What feels like a wilderness season strips away our dependence on every other source, every other pretender to the throne of our lives, as we reach another level of surrender, of giving him our ‘yes’ all over again.

In conversation this week, I agreed there are things I love about being in Scotland: it IS beautiful here, and I am surrounded by some lovely people, very blessed in many ways. However, I also acknowledged in a raw and real way, that I am feeling very discombobulated, unsure of who I am and what I am doing and that it would be so much easier to go back to where I was.

I find myself consciously having to battle the desire to run away. There is part of me that would move back to England tomorrow. When I was there, I knew how to function. I felt relatively capable, useful, effective, and definitely busy! If I went back, I could escape the uncomfortable feelings of stretching, of not really knowing where I am going here. I guess in times of transition there is always going to be that temptation to look back, like the Israelites in the desert to the life they knew ~ in a “better the devil we know” kind of way.

However, I know I am in the right place. I know God brought me here. My times are in His hands. I want him to draw me into that closer relationship with him. I know I won’t learn to be dependent on him if I never have to face the need to be dependent on him. So, I WILL trust Him, surrendering my times to Him, surrendering my desire to control my own refining process. I will submit my will, my life, my desires, my preferences and trust Him to know what He is doing. I will trust His timing. I will trust his ability to get me where he wants me, to make me how he wants to make me, more than I trust my ability to mess up! And one evidence of my submission is in the embracing of where I am right now. So God, I thank you that I am in sunny Scotland, and I give you, again, my unequivocal “YES”.