The Little Things: Seasons

SCRIPTURE:  While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. Genesis 8:22 ESV

THOUGHT: I grew up in a place with two seasons: medium hot and very hot. Growing up, elementary school featured many art projects that had to do with pumpkins, corn, and turning leaves. I loved the thought of cooler weather. Later, geography became my favorite subject simply because our books were full of pictures of beautiful places around the U.S. and the world. But my favorite pictures were always of New England in the fall, and I couldn’t wait to grow up and go see those beautiful pictures come to life. As an adult, I have spent a fair bit of time in the northeast U.S., even living in Connecticut for about six years, and it’s never gotten old (as long as I stay off Interstate 95).

I guess my hot, dusty childhood in West Texas inspired in me a permanent passion for the four seasons. Perhaps it seems a little thing, but it’s easily taken for granted. Watching the cycle of birth and growth and death and rest in nature can teach us so much about our Creator.

As we listen to the news and watch governments of the world make sweeping declarations and laws to deal with climate change, it does my heart good to go back and read God’s promise to humanity on the heels of a cataclysmic event of judgement on evil. The seasons, said God – spring and fall, summer and winter – shall not cease. As long as there’s an earth, the chronological time that God set in place will function as he ordained it. The axis and tilt will remain, the moon will wax and wane, the tides will ebb and flow, the sun will shine appropriately as the earth spins, and the days and seasons will march on until he stops them.

I, for one, am grateful.

SONG: Every Season, Nicole Nordeman

PRAYER: Oh God, you are a master designer, and I see your plan around me in nature, as well as in the cycles of my own life: birth, growth, death, rest, re-creation.