Savor Your Season, Part 2
Welcome back! Last week we kicked off this series, Savor Your Season, by highlighting the value that we must choose to acknowledge and absorb within the current season we find ourselves. If you have the time, head back over to Ecclesiastes, chapter three, and refresh your heart on our text.
The next step?
#2/Serve through your season & make your season serve you.
It truly is a choice to serve when the season you’re in weighs you down. When it’s work to just live out the days of that season; it feels like winter has settled in forever. You feel complacent and boxed in, like you’re not going to see the light of spring ever again. But this is the time that you must look up and determine, like Solomon said, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. And has put eternity in their hearts.”
Perhaps you are facing a season that is uncomfortable for you. Has anyone ever been there? It’s important that you first acknowledge what it is and why you’re there, knowing that seasons change and it won’t always be this way. But then determine what to do while you’re there.
My mom is an amazing woman and I marveled at her grit throughout my raising. My dad traveled often so she was left to carry the load of the home almost entirely on her own a lot. After she “kicked against the pricks” for a spell in trying to make the square peg of our family fit into the round hole of what seemed to be “average”, she determined that, while she was called into the ministry just as my father was, this season’s ministry was her children. So she made a decision to release my dad to do what God had called him to do and made my brother and me her personal mission. Then, over the years she would talk to my brother, Andy, and me often about what God had for our lives and the process of our becoming more and more independent. She spoke of how we would graduate high school, go to college, meet our future life mates, graduate college and fulfill God’s plans for our lives.
And then she would speak of what God had for her to do after we left the nest. Mom spoke of it so often that we started to get the sense that she couldn’t wait for us to graduate so she could get onto all the exciting things ahead for her! But she didn’t feel that way at all. She savored the season of our teenage years (I promise you, she says that herself!) and we had so much fun, but all the while, she was serving in her season faithfully, and then choosing to make that season serve her. She went back to school while we were home, she poured her life into us, and yet all the while, she was allowing and almost requiring God to produce something in her and for her at the same time. She was savoring that season, serving through it, and making it serve her.
Wait and rest with a purpose.
If your season is requiring you to sit still for a while, wait and rest with a purpose. Dig in deep while you’re standing still. Don’t just be lazy, but rest. There’s a big difference between lying on the couch, watching TV, and taking in good restful sleep. Same thing with our spirit man: Don’t allow yourself to just go numb to what’s all about you in the spirit but determine that fruit of the Spirit will be grown in your life through this time. Cultivate it, tend to it, & be fed during this respite so that when it’s time to work again, you’ll be sturdy and strong.
This entry is ENTRY TWO is our "Savor Your Season" series. To read ENTRY ONE, click here. Continue on to ENTRY THREE.
