Don’t you just love this time of year? The weather is cooling down, the flies’ days are numbered (hooray!!!) and I’m loving my sweatshirts, hot coffee, and afghans.
The seasons are changing, and I’m so looking forward to fall.
Spend enough time around me and you’ll learn that it’s my tendency to look forward to things – always planning and dreaming and scheming, picturing where I’ll be next year, in two years, in five years, in ten years…
But that means I can get so caught up in my dreams that I’m tripping over the important things I dreamed about yesterday. That’s a problem.
However, in my mid-teens I was encouraged by several sources – books, a blog, friends – to embrace the season of life I was in at that moment, rather than always dreaming, always planning, always waiting for what was around the corner.
And so I did. While still making my lists and dreaming my dreams, I wholeheartedly embraced a season that brimmed with family, schoolwork, cooking, music, writing, and spunky calves. I threw myself into the thick of it and loved it.
And then I looked up. I was turning eighteen and graduating. The season in which I had learned to delight was deteriorating before my eyes.
My first response? “NOOOOO!!!!!!!”
Seriously. I went into mourning for about a week.
My beautiful life was about to be changed… forever. I would never get back those days of being a crazy little farm kid, of doing school around the dining room table with my mom and siblings, of having the relatively simple and easy life of a child. Never.
(Whaaaaaaahhhhhh…)
What was happening to my life? I liked it just the way it was… why did I have to grow up and graduate, ruining and complicating everything? Couldn’t life just stay the same? Nice and normal and… safe?
I knew that if I was kicking and screaming (figuratively!) on my way to high school graduation, something was seriously wrong with me.
My mindset had become flawed.
Gradually, unwittingly, I had allowed my season of life to occupy a place in my heart that was never meant for anyone or anything but God. I had let it become my delight, my satisfaction and my identity, when only God can truly be those things for me.
This summer God’s been teaching me to embrace, not my seasons, but Him, the never-changing Creator of my seasons.
He’s been instructing me to work heartily at the projects the day lays before me, but to shift gears quickly if need be.
He’s been reminding me to appreciate the abundance of blessings He daily showers on me, but to allow them to turn my eyes to Him, not away from Him.
He’s been revealing to me the glorious truth that with Him, each and every day is brimming with opportunities for growth, productivity, and joy… lots of incredible joy.
He’s been encouraging me to to make Him the very center of my life – in the midst of every crazy, beautiful season and all it contains.
I want to encourage you to center your life around this incredible God.
You will not regret it.
Laurel Luehmann 