A New Season

Here in the UK spring has arrived. The sun has a gentle warmth to it, the evenings are lighter, and spring flowers have dared peek above the soil and unfurl their petals. It's a beautiful thing.

It has got me thinking about the seasons and about the seasons of our lives. Few of us fear the change of the seasons from winter to spring, or summer to autumn, just as few of us fear other cycles of nature - for example, as we move from daytime to evening, or as the tides turn. We acknowledge that these changes are 'natural' and that all is well although dramatic change is taking place around us.

I wonder why then we fear the changing seasons of our lives. If the God that holds the world in his hands is also the God who watches over me, what do I have to be afraid of? If this God, who created day and night, also created me and is familiar with every change I will encounter, can't I rest in his love?

I love that the changing seasons of our lives are acknowledged right in the heart of the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

What this says to me is that we will have change in our lives, we will be required to do different things, in different ways, in different places. More than this - the changing seasons of our lives are essential, and our loving God will use them - to show us new things, to show us more of him, to heal us, to give us space to serve - in which ever way we are called to.

Someone said to me recently, 'God has gone ahead of you today', and of course he had. He has lovingly prepared the way we should go and reached his hand out, taking ours, to gently guide us along that path, each and every day.

Can any of our 'big' changes be bigger than the changing of winter to spring? If God can manage this change pretty successfully, year in and year out, don't you think he can also take you and I through the major events of our lives - however turbulent?

I wonder if today we can take a new look at the changing seasons of our lives. Today, I'm not rowing out onto a stormy sea with waves crashing around me and no sense of what direction I should go in. Rather, what I am asked to do today is enter the warm, loving embrace of the one who knows this new season inside out - to give him my fears and to trust that he is holding me. Today he holds you close, just as he does me.