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| A Season For Everything |
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| Written by Joan Tyvoll |
| Thursday, 25 February 2010 17:33 |
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I love the changing seasons of the Christian church year. There are many flavors of Christ followers with many different worship styles and forms of organizing themselves and living out their particular convictions of how best to honor our Lord. I have found that depending on the church year to order my life fits the pattern of my life, and reflects what is important to me. Marking the seasons of our Lord’s life here on earth – his birth and death and resurrection - helps me to make sense out of my own life’s journey. The church year keeps me in the middle of his story - the greatest story ever told. I hold the picture in my heart of Christ’s church and every individual life it represents ebbing and flowing around the foundation of the stories of our faith.
It is the season of Lent in the Christian church year. We are in the time when the Bible says Jesus had set his face towards Jerusalem and the cross. During Lent, in obedience and in sympathy with him, we imitate his walk, sacrificing in small ways our own pleasures and privileges. We willingly follow him to the cross where he made the supreme sacrifice for us. He laid down his life for us, now we lay down our lives for him. It is a good season. Gardeners know that as intermidably long as the winters are, especially here in the northland, spring must come. The cold has to loosen its grip on the air and ground and the sap will begin to rise. Life and vigor will return to the slumbering landscape. God’s creation will remember the color green. I was scrapbooking last week, filling my albums with all the photos I have been storing up for some months. As I worked on the pages, it gave me the wonderful blessing of reliving the events in our lives last summer and fall. I walked in memories of birthdays, family reunions, and home projects Steve and I accomplished. I reveled in my beautiful garden’s blooms and abundant fruit from spring to fall. Bees buzzed, and hummingbirds zipped among last year’s wave petunias. A bear even stalked into the yard for a short time, then (hopefully) lumbered back down into the wilderness of the coulee. It was a glorious project. I got to remember the color green too. I had almost forgotten how rich the lawn and trees look in deep summer. I had almost forgotten the jewel like colors of orange, red, gold and pink of my lilies, peonies and zinnias. It gave me renewed hope, something I really need here at the ragged end of winter. Spring will come. I know that because God promised us the season of planting after a season of harvest and rest. I can count on his word when he says he will indeed “make everything beautiful for its own time.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) Spring will come, just as I know that Easter follows our Lord’s relentless journey to the cross on Good Friday. I live and walk in the hope of God’s sure seasons.
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