Here I go again writing about my little boy. I can’t help it. Small kids are full of so many questions and say so many thought-provoking things that it’s hard to ignore. Besides, not every devotion begins on the pages of scripture. Sometimes it starts as a little boy who wants to see some snow.
Some of us folks are trying to hang on to the warm weather, while some are ready for those crisp days of fall to roll on in. Simon is one of those people. Last year he got to enjoy over a week of snowy fun, and he hasn’t forgotten it.
I tried explaining to him in the simplest way that the season for snow doesn’t come until all the leaves fall off the trees. So, for the past several days, he has got up every morning and asked if all the leaves are gone yet.
“No, not yet. Just keep waiting. It’s not the season for snow yet.”
I thought that was a good way to explain it, but then as I passed by the Baptist Church in town, I saw the Gingko tree on the front lawn and realized that I may have some explaining to do soon. You see, the Gingko tree will drop all of its leaves in one day, not over a period of days or weeks.
The tree begins preparing itself for the winter by making “scars” at the junction of the leaf stem so that it can protect itself against disease once the leaves are gone.
All trees do this little by little, but the Gingko tree does it all at the same time. That is why after the first really cold day of fall, the leaves will suddenly drop all in one day. For that tree, the seasons have changed overnight. Too bad we can’t have seasons in our life like that.
If you are like me, there are some personal seasons that you wish you could skip or rush through. Seasons of doubt, seasons of heartache, seasons of hardship, seasons of failure. Those are the ones we struggle through and pray will pass quickly. Those are the only seasons that Christians seem to mention at all.
When was the last time that you heard someone mention their season of joy or happiness or season of blessing? We overlook those seasons because the tough seasons are the ones that affect us the most. Those are the seasons that wear us down and often change our lives in the most dramatic ways.
But oh, if we could take a lesson from that Gingko tree, we could face the hard seasons with much more hope and faith. You see, in those good seasons are times that we should be developing those “scars” of protection to defend ourselves against the hard times ahead.
We should be seeking the word of God every day and taking it to heart. We should be learning of Him and His ways. So that when the seasons of difficulty overwhelm us, we can see that “…our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
We all want to rush through the worst seasons, and we pray that the Lord will bring it to an end all at once, but if we can just hang on and persevere till the end, the season to come will be absolutely beautiful...Prepare before the season to endure the season.
