Brown's Daily Word 9-23-09

Good morning,

Praise the Lord for this new day. Today is the first full day of Autumn, as we entered the Autumn season yesterday afternoon. Just 2 days ago, as my wife was walking, she commented that she had seen no snakes all summer. Not a minute later, right on cue, one showed its ugly face along the roadside. Autumn is one of the gloriously beautiful seasons in the Northeastern United States. As the sap slows down in the trees, the leaves slowly change to shades of brown, gold, orange, and red. Through all the years of our lives this change has always happened, as though triggered by a clock. We often ponder as to what is the trigger for this great event. Is it the coming of frost? (We have not had any yet.) Is it because the earth is becoming dry? (This year is not so dry.) Is it more related to the amount of time that the leaves are out on the trees? Whatever is the "trigger", God is faithful, and He is the author of all the seasons.

Praise the Lord for His faithfulness. Praise the Lord that His love never fails. It is written, "The Lord said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind. . . . As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." (Genesis 8:21, 22)

One of the blessings of living in the Northeast or New England is the dramatic change of seasons. According to the Biblical story, seasons as we know them apparently started sometime between the Garden of Eden and the flood. If there were seasons in the Garden of Eden, they must have been very mild, since Adam and Eve had no need of clothing. They began wearing clothes, not for protection from hot or cold weather, but to hide their shame after having disobeyed God's command. Only after the flood do we have God's promise that "as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22). Clearly the wide shifts of seasons as we now know them have been established by this point in the biblical narrative.

Considering that a flood had just wiped out most life on earth, it was very comforting for God to say that there would never be another flood--that the seasons would always continue. To this day, there is something comforting in knowing that as surely as day follows night, the seasons will follow each other - spring, summer, fall, and winter. We can depend on the seasons. When winter approaches, we know that in the spring the flowers will bloom once again, the trees will again leaf out, and we will have another year of crops to provide food for our tables.

God's promise does not apply only to nature's seasons. God's promise of continual seasons also relates to our experience as human beings. Our physical body is part of the natural world. As with the rest of nature, it goes through cycles, the largest of which is the cycle of birth, growth, maturity, old age, and death.

These are the large seasons of our life. Infancy and childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. Some of us do not experience all these seasons physically. We grieve when a young person dies because he or she did not get the chance to complete a full life cycle. Growing old is mandatory; growing wise is optional. Our physical stages are not a matter of choice--but our spiritual stages are. We have all met older people who seem not to have progressed emotionally beyond their earlier stages. They still center their lives around themselves, or the way they look, or their material possessions, or even being involved with "the right crowd." They have not come to the wisdom of centering their lives around the real center of the universe--the Lord. In John's Gospel, Jesus gives us a sense of that urgency in the spiritual seasons. "You say there are still four more months until the harvest," he says, "but look around you! The fields are ripe for harvesting right now!" The Lord was not talking about the physical fields. For that, the disciples would have had to wait the four months until the crops ripened. No, Jesus was talking about the spiritual fields. Whatever season of life we are in, the fields are always ripe for harvest.

In Christ,

Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-zJHgaoVa4