Welcome, dear readers!
First of all, I want to thank everyone for your understanding and flexibility with our new schedule change that I announced last week! I’m looking forward to seeing where this new routine takes us…
Second, this past weekend I had the great honor of being included as a contributor in The Ecological Disciple, a fantastic free online resource for faith-filled stewardship. My article, Embracing The Meadow, deals with building our ethic of garden pest control on a Christian foundation. Check it out, if that interests you, and be sure to read the other articles on The Ecological Disciple, as well!
Without any further ado, on with the devotional!
long, unbroken days sun upon sun summer, a dry spell, a stretch of same; garden parched and reaching leaves thirsty, am I praying for rain? or am I praying for change? and would either serve to bring me closer to You?
If the weather forecast holds true, this devotional will go out on our first truly rainy day in a while. But while it’s being written, this devotional’s author is still praying for the prophecy to come true.
As I mentioned last week, I find summer difficult. I don’t love the heat, and I never quite know what to do with it. But really, often it’s the “same-ness” that gets to me.
Our two solstice seasons, summer and winter, have the same “same-ness” about them, despite being opposites. Winter feels like long, unbroken stretches of gray, while summer feels like long, unbroken stretches of sun. But in either case, the same-ness can feel maddening. You just want hope that something is going to change.
It puts me in mind of past seasons in my life, the toughest ones. Jobs that didn’t fulfill me or downright sapped me of my joy. Living situations that were difficult to navigate. Periods of loneliness as a younger adult when I didn’t know how to process that loneliness. Seasons that, while I was in them, felt impossibly long and horribly unchanging.
Day after day of same, same, same. Praying for rain. Praying for change.
It’s a strange truth that God is sometimes easier to seek in a crisis. In the storm, or in the midst of fear. But we tend to lose sight of Him in the monotony, the everyday, the humdrum. We get hypnotized by the drumbeat.
But He doesn’t disappear just because we can’t see Him.
During these high summer days I find myself praying for rain. But as much as I would like a day off from watering the garden and the rain would be a relief from the dust, what I’m really praying for is change. Something else. Something to relieve the same-ness.
And yet, what I really should be praying for is trust. Not that I need a change to see my Creator moving in the day-to-day, but that He is there in the same-ness just as much as the change.
In the long stretch of sunshine, and in the freak days of summer rain.
Discussion Question:
Have you ever had a season of “same-ness” that you felt would never end? What change were you praying for? And where did you find God in that season?
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My spiritual director once told me that she felt that seasonality was placed in my heart for a reason - my instinct is always to feel that whatever the day gives is permanent. Future rain feels impossible on dry hot days, peace feels impossible on the suffering days. That's where faith, and a faith based in the gift of seasonality, has been the path I have chosen to hold fast to.
I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis' Uncle Screwtape:
"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before."
"Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship."
"This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns."
This summer will not ends. I’m driving 4-6 hours a day to get my kiddos to their designated activities/therapies/school. After my husband had an emergency surgery, I’m feeling the pressure of being the one who’s holding it all together...between the heavy lifting, housework, childcare, and stressing over all the bills.
I am finding God in noticing the details in my drives. Picking up my kids and hearing about their day. I’m having my whole family at home, healthy and cared for. And yet with all of that said, I am so ready for back to school and fall weather!