From the Pastor’s Desk/March-April, 2012
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” Genesis 9:27
My daffodils are in full flower, and the tulips are right behind them, and it’s only mid-March. It reminds me that every time I think I have life figured out, I get surprised. Even the inner weather of my soul doesn’t always the follow the patterns that I expect based on past years and past seasons of life.
I have always liked variety. One of my high school teachers at Ben Lippen High School in the mountains of North Carolina wrote in my yearbook: “Knowing you has been an ever-ending source of variety.” I think he was commenting on how quickly and intensely my interests and emotions shifted. Up until that time, my life had been a series of frequent moves, changes in climate, location and people. From Santiago, Chile my parents took us to Clarkton, North Carolina, then to South Holland, Illinois, then to Mexico City, Mexico, then to Pasadena, California—all between 1st and 9th grade.
But I have learned that constant variety gets addictive. And it is distracting. It gets in the way of focus. It encourages one to dodge the lessons that are learned when one can’t move away from problems or from interpersonal conflict. A plant that’s frequently uprooted does not thrive.
So as much as I love variety, I’ve learned to value stability—things that stay the same: the same place, the same people, the same routines year in and year out.
In fact, as I was pondering the invitation to consider serving in Delavan many years ago, I was reading a book by Eugene Peterson. In that book, Under the Unpredictable Plant, he writes about “staying where you are.” He found this principle of “stability” in the writings of the Benedictine order of monks. This principle was instituted among monks who were on the move, on the road, looking for a better spiritual experience at the next stop. Benedict substituted that with a version of “bloom where you are planted.” And of course to bloom, some plants must not be moved too much.
God recognized our need for stability when he made the promise we have in Genesis 9:27 that he would give us predictable seasons and cycles of day of night. This came after the disaster of the flood overwhelmed the world. He knew we couldn’t live with the stress of endless catastrophes. So in his grace he limits those—few places on earth endless, consecutive catastrophes.
But God also understands our need for variety, and so nothing stays the same for long, not even ourselves. No year is exactly like the previous year. Different things keep happening to us and to our world. Sometimes history seems to repeat itself, but there’s always something new and different about the present moment.
So as we move into another spring, all things will be renewed in nature once again. But storms will dismantle other things. In our personal lives, we will celebrate a new season of growth for ourselves and those we love; but we may also mourn the decline or the end of a season of our lives.
In all this variety what remains predictable is the presence of God; his love; his grace; his comfort; his peace; his help.
The God who was our help in ages past is our hope for years to come. He will be our shelter in the stormy blast—if that’s what awaits us this spring. And best of all, he will be our eternal home.
We can live in the confidence and the courage that this assurance provides!
Pastor Dan
