Seasons

11

I wrote something last week that was profound even to me. It is important that you love your own work first. The world is a bad place, notoriously bad, and most times, you’ll have to be your own cheerleader. It doesn’t matter how many people love and support you, you’ll need to have yourself in your own corner. It doesn’t matter how amazing everyone else thinks you are if you don’t think you are amazing. So I read last week’s blog post and thought, ‘Wow! This is profound Mwendwa.’ But after I read, I thought that I had written that blog post from the end. There’s stuff that I didn’t talk about that is so important for us to know and understand.

I wrote about the gift of time but I should have started with a conversation around seasons. Everything in the world revolves around seasons. In the book of beginnings, God had just destroyed the earth with water. His servant, Noah, had just emerged from the ark after the waters had subsided. He then builds an altar and sacrifices to God. God then appears to him and makes a covenant with him. God told Noah that ‘while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.’

With this one statement punctuated in five pauses, God sets up a system, a system known as seasons.

The world had never known seasons. It had never known winter, autumn, summer or spring. It had never rained before in the earth. This covenant between God and Noah causes a shift in the way the earth works. God creates seasons. From then, if you wanted to harvest you had to sow. The earth would from that time operate around seasons. Let me discuss a few things about seasons.

Firstly, it is important to know that seasons are God ordained. It is God who created seasons. He called them to order. We will go through all manner of seasons in this life. Say you might be going through a summer season where it is sunny; everything is good, all bright and colourful. Someone else might be going through a winter season where everything is cold; the marriage is cold, the job is ending, the contracts aren’t coming, friends have left and there’s nothing working. But, we need to understand that these are seasons. Every season is God ordained, the good, the bad and the ugly; God sets them all up.

And if seasons are God ordained then what that means is that you cannot rebuke them. No matter how spiritual you think you are you cannot call summer into the winter season. You can rebuke something that is caused by people, the devil or yourself but you cannot rebuke God. You cannot rebuke process. Seasons teach us how to be patient, how to endure, how to tolerate and go through the season, how to do the time. Daniel said that ‘it is God who changes the times and the seasons. It is He who removes kings and raises up others.’ Ladies and gentlemen, seasons belong to God.

I don’t know whether this should encourage you or not, but I’d tell you this. That if God is the author of seasons then I should never worry about what season I’m in. Whether it is a good season or a bad season, it shouldn’t matter. Why? Because, my Father, God, is the one who calls seasons into being. Why would I be anxious over something that God is the holder of? I know that God called it into being; I also know that the same God will call it off in when its time is done.

The second lesson today is that every season has a purpose and a reason. This for me didn’t make sense until I thought a bit around it. I then realised that nothing created by God is useless. All seasons have a reason and a purpose. I started looking at the life of a farmer closely. I noted that farmers understand seasons better than most people. The farmer will tell you that even though summer and spring are good times, they wouldn’t appreciate it if God just let the whole year be summer or spring. They will tell you that even though they require the rainy season for the seed to grow they do not want it to rain all through the year. A farmer will tell you that winter has its purpose as much as summer does. If summer doesn’t come then the harvest won’t dry-it will rot. The rainy season then will have been useless.

King Solomon once said that ‘there is a time and a season for everything under the earth.’ If you’ll understand this then you’ll know to appreciate seasons. Life is built around knowing that life exists around different seasons and that the meaning of life is in learning how to maximize each seasons. Understand what the good times are for and maximize them. It is rattling to think that there is a time when the good season will end and a bad season will come. It is even amazing to know that there are lessons to learn during bad seasons. You don’t benefit by fighting a bad season, you grow by embracing the season and learning why you are there in the first place. I hope you know that a bad season that teaches you character, patience, grace, self-dependence and maturity, is better and more beneficial than a good season that teaches you nothing.

Lastly, every season has a beginning and an end.

Understanding seasons will teach you that nothing lasts forever. Let me apply this in the seasons we call ‘bad’. The Psalmist in the 5th verse of the 30th Psalm says that ‘weeping may last through the night but joy comes with the morning’. See the night is a season and the morning is a season. When the morning comes the night ends, automatically. There’s no meeting held between the morning and the night to discuss whether one should give way. No! One season comes and the other season leaves. The Psalmist is telling us something profound. He is saying that regardless of how bad your season is it will come to an end.

It is therefore imprudent to be stuck on one season regardless of how bad it might be. Why? Because it will end! My lesson from this is that because everything has a timeline and an expiry date, I will praise the author of the night during the dark times, even as a weep, as I wait for the morning.

God is the author of seasons, every season has its purpose and nothing lasts forever.

19 Comments
  1. Seasons are a mystery. Thank you for taking time and expounding on this mystery. Thank you for speaking the mind of God, His very utterance.

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