A Time For Every Season

Can it be that summer has ended?

Can the long days of endless rays have passed?  Can autumn have arrived, that time of year when all things so lush and lovely die - or simply lie dormant for the coming frigid months?   The season, the months marked by illness, by silence, by darkness.  A stark contrast to the hot and hazy days at the lake.  Blowing bubbles, boys warming under the sun, sprawled on hot sand.

I recently read in a wonderful little book, One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, that all new life is birthed out of darkness.  How true!  Don't I think the same every spring as new life emerges from the dark?  The days lengthen, the clouds make way for the gleaming sun.  Crocuses peek out from under the snow, the trees bud anew with the freshness of new life stemming from what appear to be lifeless limbs.  Newborns emerging from the darkness of a womb, lambs, piglets - tiny little people!

Without the darkness of the crucifixion there is no resurrection, no ascension.  Without darkness, there is no contrast of light.
There is a time for every season.

Oh to embrace the autumns of life, the assurance that we who believe, who trust in the One, will be delivered.

Looking back on the many autumns of life, how they seem to have brightened in time.  Seeing how the Lord has used them for good, for growth.  How those times of storms, of illness, of cold have been used to strengthen us  - our faith- in the One who hears and answers each and every request, every utterance made in His name.

Once upon a time, a dark time (or was it?), I was told by a college advisor at the completion of my junior year that I would not be accepted into the education program.  The lowest grade earned in an education class a B+.  A well known Christian college on the north shore of Boston, the advisor's only explanation, "We don't think you will pass the state teacher exam.  You don't test well and you will bring down our national ranking, therefore we won't have you in our program".   End of discussion.

What of the thousands of dollars spent on that "education"?  Never mind the money, when did national rankings become more important than an individual!?
When did test scores come to mean more than 
evidence of a job well done?
Did they not have a responsibility, as a Christian institution, as elders, mentors, professors and advisors, to teach me well?  To offer grace?  To let me try... and even fail?

Today, eleven years later... how different may my life have been had I received the degree that I'd earned and put it to use?  Would I have learned what it means to be submissive to my husband?  To be a wife, a help-meet, a keeper at home, a woman?  Would I have upheld my vows to him - for worse, for poorer... in sickness?

Would I have invested as much of my life, of myself, in raising Godly young men, or would I have gone the way of the vast majority...
...the luke-warm way?  

Would I have placed a higher priority on career had it been an option?

Would I have opted to go against the grain, teaching my own children at home, following the biblical directive to train them 24 hours a day seven days a week.  Would I have taken my responsibility as a wife and as a mother as seriously as I have or would I have delegated my responsibility to others more "qualified" by the world's standards.

Perhaps I would have.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps my convictions would have led me to do and be what God requires.  Regardless, that particular autumn has brought about spring.  I can now see a glimpse, in hindsight, of how God used that particular darkness.

That year as a college junior was filled with mixed emotions - autumn, winter, spring, and summer- rolled into one!  Dan and I engaged to be married, my being forced out of college - the only option to begin all over again with a different major- panic attacks, wedding plans, Dan's college graduation, me - a failure - without having failed.

How that autumn has shaped me.  My worldview, my thoughts on marriage, child training, parenting.  My thoughts on gender roles, feminism, women in the workplace.  My thoughts on education, on school, on intelligence, on life.

The autumn, the winter, beckons us to draw nearer to the warmth, to the light. The Light that is Christ.

The summer is past, autumn is upon us.

May I see His hand this season in ALL things - in the clouds, the snow, the bitter cold, the gray.  May I not only revel in His power and glory in the spring, but may I see, feel, His hand always upon us in autumn, in winter, in the seemingly dormant times of life as well.  If only I could have eyes to see, to find the light in the dark and to see more than the step just ahead.  

If only I could learn to look ahead and look beyond, to the spring that inevitably lies 
just on the other side of winter.