The Good News by Ruth Bearden
Wow! The dog days of summer have arrived. The last week of June is upon us, summer activities are in full swing, and it is 100° in Madison. Yet, I walked into a home store in Athens yesterday and saw decorations out for Halloween. Halloween? That is still more than four months away. HOW can anybody be thinking about fall when we’ve barely begun summer?
Inevitably, seasons will come, and seasons will go. No matter how much we try to hold on to them or wish them away, we eventually learn that nothing stays the same except our God. Genesis 8:22 tells us that “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” In this constantly changing and often chaotic world, I try to remember these things:
God is present in THIS season, and in this moment. He wants us to embrace the season that we are in. There are seasons in life that we love and welcome – sweet chapters with loved ones and peaceful circumstances that we don’t want to pass by. But even in those good times, we can get ahead of ourselves and spend so much time worrying about the next season that we miss out on the joys of this current and fleeting moment in time. Or perhaps we find ourselves in a hard season that is so difficult that all that we can do is wait for it to end. Whatever our situation, we can know that God walks with us, and He will never forsake us. We trust that God can use even the hard things for good, perhaps in ways we cannot see this side of heaven. God wants us to find the joy in the season we are in, because true and lasting joy comes from Him, not from our momentary circumstances.
There is a beautiful passage beginning in Luke 5:33 that relates to this. Jesus is having dinner at Matthew the Tax Collector’s house and Pharisees are giving Him grief about all manner of things. They question him about why his disciples are celebrating instead of piously fasting like John’s disciples. Jesus responds with the beautiful illustration of feasting with the bridegroom while He is present. What Jesus is telling them is this: “ I am here with you right here, right now. Whatever you circumstance, I am with you, and I am all you need. Now is the time to celebrate. Now is the time to feast. ”
A Season does not define us. Regret steals our joy. God doesn’t want us to hold onto regret about past seasons. Yes, we should own our mistakes, ask for forgiveness and make amends, but once we have earnestly done that, we are forgiven. God is in the redemption business. When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well in John Chapter 4, she was in a season of shame – she’d had five husbands and was an outcast in her world. There were so many reasons she was not worthy to give this man a drink of water. Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t even give her a name. Maybe that’s because we are all the woman at the well. Who of us that has lived long enough has not had a season of regret? A chapter that we wish we could do over? Yes, we know the woman at the well. Most of us have felt her pain. Jesus already knew all about her, just as he knows all about you. And he didn’t care about any of that. He just loved her. He just loves you. Hear the beautiful words that Jesus spoke to her. He speaks them to you too: “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.” If only you knew. If only we knew the gift God has for us, our past seasons wouldn’t matter. We would not be worrying about the next season. We would be celebrating the presence of Jesus in the here and now. This, my friends, is the time to feast.
