Seasons

 Note: I wrote this back in August and forgot to publish it, but it was too good not to share. So, you guys get two blog posts this week. :)

Ukarumpa with a lovely double rainbow over it

 The smell of freshly roasting coffee and rain glide through my window into my office. The weather is turning cooler and more foggy but the rain has slacked off as we creep into the dry season. And so we make another determined march through the seasons, ticking off the months in their turn. In the northern hemisphere Summer is tantalizingly close. Schools are finishing up their year and kids are counting down the days until break and endless hours without homework or classes.

Right now some friends and I are studying the way God’s story starts in Genesis and wraps through the whole Bible, weaving in and out of what feel like unrelated stories and poetry and pronouncements of doom should the people not repent. But as we look for the common thread of God’s story I can see God’s rhythms of creation and giving and of hope. I can also see humanity’s ability to utterly turn their back on God and tear down the good and the beautiful. God’s broken heart shines through the cracks even as his punishment is meted out. It’s meant to turn people away from the things they are choosing to destroy themselves. And through it all His longing for their return to Him and to what is right and good seeps even into the hard and the painful. The thread of extravagant compassion and mercy and lavish favor twines through every page. I can see Jesus throughout the story pointing to His ultimate victory and healing of humanity’s broken story.

It’s hard and beautiful and awe inspiring. And I can see those same rhythms in the coffee roasting, graduations, weddings, illness, death, flowers blooming, vegetables coming to fruit, sunrises. The cycle of lovely and difficult and rescue and love. It’s wrapped in miniature in the every day and writ large over the pages of history and the Bible. As I look at all these things the truth of these verses ring clear “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17 NLT)

The promise…. That hope, is what sustains through the pleasurable and the painful. Jesus has come and he has and will rescue for those who reach out to him. Seasons may come and go, but Jesus is the same and will walk with us through each one.