This Season and the Next

To everything there is a season . . . (Ecc. 3:1)

If you live in North Carolina for very long you quickly realize that life is defined by two seasons. The first is basketball season. To be more precise, ACC basketball season. The second of the two seasons – at least where I lived in Wake County – is tobacco season. As Ecclesiastes says, there is a time to plant and a time to uproot. For four years I marked the season by seeing Richard Jenks on his John Deere tractor, plowing the field across the street from my house.

To my distant and citified observations, tobacco farming was a seasonal endeavor marked by planting (settin’ out) and harvest (putin’ in). I assumed that tobacco growers worked hard in spring and late summer /fall, recuperating from their labor in the cold months. I learned differently when Donny Olive showed me the greenhouse on his farm that sheltered thousands of tiny tobacco plants and supplied growers throughout the state.

Beneath a massive canopy was an expansive array of small plastic trays with little square compartments like the ones you used in the days before ice makers in your freezer. Each little compartment held a tiny tobacco plant, no bigger than the end of my little finger. These plants were carefully nurtured, watered on a schedule, never allowed to get too cold. It became clear to me that the success of what happened in the spring and summer depended upon the success of preparations made in winter. One season was integrally connected to the other and the “tobacco season” was actually happening all the time.

Chances are, the season you’re in right now doesn’t stand alone. If you know joy now, you may know it well because you’ve tasted sorrow. If you’re feeling smothered by sorrow now, past joy may be what you cling to as a source of hope for your future. What’s more – God works year ‘round, and the season you’re in today may well be preparation for a season yet to come, a season not yet available to your imagination.

Here are two questions for you to ponder today: can you identify a past season that somehow prepared you for where you are today? Further, can you see that the present season may in fact be God’s way of preparing you for a season yet to come?

Prayer: Merciful God, I’m thankful that you are always working and that you are faithful in every season of my life. Work in me today by your Spirit to prepare me for whatever you have for me in the coming seasons of my life. Amen.