Seasons

             I establish My covenant with you, and all flesh shall never again be eliminated by the waters of a flood, nor shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant which I am making between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for [g]all future generations; I have set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall [h]serve as a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth. It shall come about, when I make a cloud appear over the earth, that the rainbow will be seen in the cloud, and I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and never again shall the water become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the rainbow is in the cloud, then I will look at it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” And God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between Me and all flesh that is on the earth.”  (Genesis 9:11-17)

The Lord smelled the soothing aroma, and the Lord said [m]to Himself, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the [n]intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.

While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Summer and winter,
And day and night
Shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:21-22)

 

This morning as I walked Grace and let my mind wander (oops) I turned a corner and found this.

I know, it’s a little hard to see. I’ll come back to that. What came to mind wasn’t the first passage above that deals with the rainbow, but the second, promise that comes just before it. It’s all about seasons.

It seems to me that our well-choreographed seasons vernal equinox to summer solstice is spring, autumnal equinox to winter solstice is autumn, and summer and winter fit between them in nice scheduled cycles is, at best, over-simplified. Spring begins around March 20, but I can’t plant most of what I want to plant until the end of May, leaving only three weeks of “spring” before summer begins. It's worse in Florida because, for me, a second spring begins in October or November, and autumn (harvest) may well arrive just before I leave, which is the beginning of spring according to the calendar, but fall according to the plants, and the beginning of summer according to my internal thermometer.

I was taught that spring was the time when the earth came alive when you planted the crops you want to harvest in autumn. Summer is the time when plants grow. But in between, there’s this deadly season of waiting. It’s not summer. The plants aren’t growing. Not only that, but not all plants are ready to harvest at the same time. You pick at least some strawberries in June or July. Cool-weather crops may be planted much earlier, and be harvested before summer, or early in summer. And, there’s that inconvenient fact that south of the equator, as December approaches, they’re looking toward the end of spring and the beginning of summer.

I’m not even going to try to begin to analyze the seasons in my life. Suffice to say that my life has not been divided into nice, neat quarters. Last year, I read books about seasons in our lives, and one of the things that comes back to me is that I can be “planting” in one area of my life, harvesting in another, and experiencing rest or death in a third.

No, seasons aren’t as simple as we want them to be. They aren’t ours to command, and they may be as unpredictable as the seasons in The Game of Thrones or The Stormlight Archives (and the thought that the seasons there may be a reflection of the seasons of society makes me a tiny bit less irritated with Martin’s and Sanderson’s horrible misuses of climate patterns.) It should also be noted that God doesn’t even guarantee that the seasons will follow as we name them. He makes promises about there being seedtime and harvests, and about summer and winter, but His parallel language is cold and heat, not the heat we expect in spring, summer, and harvest or the cold we expect in winter.

In other words, just as the rainbow in the picture above is hard to see, so, can seasons be. God, His promises, and their fulfillment may be difficult to discern among the clouds of life, but our failure to see or to understand (a different way of seeing) doesn’t mean He doesn’t see and remember His promise.