Changing Seasons

I love to go out in the yard in the afternoon and evening when the light from the descending sun is so beautiful and the shade from the surrounding trees is simply perfect. I like to face the field behind our house and watch the breeze rustle the leaves overhead; it's very relaxing. I find a great deal of inspiration in those times, and quiet times are wonderful for hearing from the Lord.

A couple of weeks ago as I was enjoying my usual view, it suddenly hit me that the entire field of wheat was now golden. I had just been walking past the field and telling my children how it reminded me of the ocean when the wheat would wave in the wind, so I knew it had been very green. It was as if overnight it went from completely green to completely gold. No slow fade, no gradual change, just abrupt and complete difference. I felt in that moment that the Lord was teaching me about how quickly things change in our lives. We don't know when it will be - what week, what day, not even what hour - that the seasons in our life will shift. It seems really simple and probably a very basic knowledge, but it was one of those light bulb moments of truth for me in my own life.

Take a tree, for instance... A tree does not choose when the seasons will change. It does not know from day to day when the weather will cool and its leaves will fall, leaving it completely bare. Nor does it know from day to day when the weather will warm and its blossoms will begin to adorn those long arms again. A tree changes with the seasons automatically and without contemplation.

We are certainly not trees, and often we know the seasons in our lives are beginning to change well in advance of them actually doing so, although there are times that they change unexpectedly. However, if we have placed our trust in the Lord, if we have surrendered our will to Him, and when we put aside our own plans to put His will above our own, then we have no need to fear in any of the seasons of our life. There will be the wonderful seasons when everything seems to be perfect and wonderful, and at these times we need to soak up all we can of the Lord and His presence and His word and His wisdom. Because the fact is, seasons change. There will be seasons of winter, seasons that feel like utter desolation and, at times, like bitter cold in our heart, and at those times we must lean on the strength that only God can give, and run to the arms of the only One who can walk us through - our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Seasons change, but when we put our trust in God, we have peace that He is going to bring us through all of the hardest seasons of our lives into the glorious peace of the very best seasons in Him.