Becky and I often talk of the “seasons of life”. These are usually tied to geography but sometimes we’ve stayed in one place through two or more life seasons. For us the last 8 years have been “the California season”.
God gives different seasons of life as well as seasons of the year. Though as a culture we’ve lost much of the natural context of the seasons, there is still some cultural residue of where these came from, if we take time to remember: planting (spring), growth (summer), harvest (fall) and land’s rest (winter). Our lives go through similar seasons. Some are for planting - as when we prepare for a career or begin having children. Some are for growth - those busy years in family and business, when we’re trying to take care of the present and build for the future at the same time. Others are harvest seasons - when we reap in our families or work lives what we’ve sown. And there are yet other seasons in which we appear to be more dormant - ones where we reflect on what’s happened and what is yet to come.
We like to take time at the end of a season to get away to a quiet place to reflect on the season that’s been. Last Sunday we went out to Joshua Tree National Park to do that. Joshua Tree has been a refuge for our souls during this California season. It has been a place where we could escape the congestion and the constant noise that surrounds us. Sometimes, if we stayed late enough, we could even see a clear dark sky and the depths of creation arrayed above us. It’s an amazing place.
We’ve used a variety of questions to help stimulate our musings in the past. Yesterday our reflections included these questions:
- What was my primary expression of service?
- What was my primary expression of faith?
- What special helps or graces did God give during this time?
- What new things did I discover about myself?
- How have I changed?
- What new relationships did God give?
- What do I need to do to close out this season well?
I won’t try to convince you that these are the “right questions” to ask. They’re just questions that I find really useful. And as we reflect on these things we sometimes see things that are yet to be done so that we close out the season well.
This blog is already ‘beyond a comfortable length’, so let me mention just one of the insights from the California season that I reflected on yesterday: Isaac started well, but finished poorly. Isaac was the child of faith, raised by his father Abraham, the friend of God. God provided him a wife in answer to a servant’s prayer of faith and his wife Rebecca turned from the idols worshiped by her family to the God of Abraham and herself became a woman of faith to whom God spoke in answer to prayer.
But over time Isaac acquired a taste for good food, much like his older son, Esau. And so Isaac overlooked Esau’s lack of interest in spiritual things. And although Isaac lived to be 180 years old, by the time he was 100 he feared his “imminent death” and determined to pass on his father Abraham’s blessing to a son. And here Isaac makes a grave error in judgment. Isaac decides to bestow on his older son Esau the blessing of Abraham, a blessing that Esau has no interest in - a blessing which Isaac also knew God had promised to his younger son, Jacob, even before the brothers’ birth. You can read the whole sad story in Genesis 21 - 27. The nuances are easy to miss. If I hadn’t heard a message by the Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke explaining it all, I wouldn’t have seen it.
I don’t want to be like Isaac: start well and end poorly. I’ll wait and let God judge how well I did in the spring and summer seasons. But for now, I want to focus on finishing fall and winter well. I’ll guard my heart from the despotism of pleasure and my soul from the fear of death. Instead I’ll look for opportunities to serve and express God’s trustworthiness through my words and actions.
Becky and I laugh about how apt the expression “the California season” of our lives is - because our part of California only has one season! And we’re definitely looking forward to going back to Illinois where there are clearly four seasons to the year. And yet we’ll always look back on these eight years with gratitude for all the good that God did for us and our children during our “California season”.
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