When You Find Yourself Tired of Hard Seasons

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” –– 1 Peter 1:6-7 (ESV)

I’m eagerly waiting for this hard season to change. Summer’s relentless heat and drought is oppressive, making the months long. Nothing cheers my heart more than that first nip of fall air and the sight of colors beginning to turn. It’s no secret: fall is my favorite season. Yet even as summer fades, I admit I’m already dreading the return of heat. My joy for the new season dims, overshadowed by a sense of loss for what I had looked forward to. It’s frustrating.

Why can’t every season be a comfortable, fall-like kind of season?

I can’t escape the fact that life often changes in ways I wouldn’t choose or prefer.

I wonder how much of my life I have spent locked in the shadows of harsh seasons.  How many beautiful moments have been shelved, and how much joy have I missed, simply because I have been hyper-focused on trying to survive the bad ones? In trials that grieve me, I just want the greener pastures. I want to hurry up and get to the other side of the pain. I want to learn and grow, but please don’t make the process long and painful!

If we’re honest, many of us would wish pain out of existence.

How can anything possibly grow in life’s fiery trials, especially something as fragile as faith? Pain often feels purposeless.

Yet God often uses freshly-turned soil to help us grow. Just as hardened soil transforms into something rich and nurturing, seasons of pain can cultivate vibrant faith within us.

Reflecting on this idea, I recall my time in the Colorado Mountains. Each summer, my family escapes the heat by traveling there. Several years ago, an infestation of pests began to wipe out many of the pine trees that decorated the beautiful mountainside. That fresh pine and green that adorned the slopes for miles became dead, brown sticks. During that sad season, park rangers painstakingly conducted controlled burns to kill disease and safely remove the dead trees. Had the dead trees been allowed to stand, an uncontrolled, disastrous fire would have been just a spark away. Knowing those fires were necessary didn’t make seeing the blackened slopes and smelling the smoke-tinged air less difficult. This wasn’t the kind of typical experience you would expect to have in the beautiful Colorado mountains. They didn’t look beautiful in the aftermath of the fire.

Though many slopes appeared as blackened wastelands, underneath, new life was already growing. These controlled burns allowed the forest to stay healthy and would help it thrive again.

Often, my life smells and looks a lot like these slopes.

Sometimes, I look in the mirror and barely recognize the person staring back at me. This person feels threadbare, certainly not thriving. I blink, struggling to see potential growth beneath all that is burned. Refining seasons do change me. In pain, it’s easy to forget God has control over them. But these hard seasons don’t have the best of me; through them God has the best for me.

What is best for me?

In God’s eyes, what’s best is a faith more precious than gold. A faith that is not just intact, but thriving in spite of the fire. God knows that what’s best for me is a life that rises from the ashes, emboldened to praise Him. A life that shines glory back up to Him. A life not afraid to bow low and give due honor to the God Most High.

What is best for me is a refined life, made ready to see Jesus more fully.

Not all change is bad. Change God orchestrates is beautiful and good.

Seasons do change, but there is a process we must walk through as God uses them to change us. God knows exactly which dead trees and thorny shrubs need to go. He knows if they are left unattended to, they are just a spark away from wreaking havoc in our lives. It is a tender, gracious mercy that in some seasons, God chooses to burn the dead away.

All this is God’s work, and though it is painful work, it is good work.

Hard seasons are worth celebrating, because God loves us too much to leave us unchanged.

Pictures courtesy of Pexels.com

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It’s been a while since I last wrote, I admit.  In the time between Winter ending and Spring beginning I have taken extra moments to rest.  In these moments I have been able to disconnect in order to connect more fully to the people most precious to me, my family.  I have seen a year pass and in this time reflect on the milestone of my father’s home-going.  Just this week I received official word that the estate handling had finally found an end.  This business of walking through the valley of the shadow of death has finalized, settled, come to completion.  For now.

And on goes life.

Winter has gone, Spring has come and already it’s preparing to give way to Summer.  Time spins round so rapidly it’s hard to believe that all this new color will fade to Fall in a mere few months.  Time collects so much, leaves so much, and in it’s span of the space between the dots God works change in the landscape of our life.  God changes things, He changes us.

Settle

I have discovered death to be just one of the tools God can use to remind us of the important things, or rather, what should be the most important thing:  the reality of God in our lives, changing us, using us.  I admit that even as I write my thoughts are spinning in a million directions and my heart is heavy.  This week has brought with it news that is as hard to read as it is to understand.  Another senseless and cruel bombing took place in England followed by news of the sudden death of a childhood youth instructor who was kind, humble and a selfless servant. Shocking news.  Hard news.  Every day news hits with another harsh reality of just how hard, bitter, ugly and cold the world’s landscape is becoming.

And so with that a warning:  I’m about to tear down a fence that I’ve been dancing around for far too long.  I generally try to steer clear of writing anything “political” but to be honest, I’m over all the snarkiness.  Politics are not going to change or save us.  Only God can save.  All the ugliness we see in this world can not be solved by the culture’s latest social agenda or terminology re-defining.  You can attempt to re-define marriage and gender but it will never change what God, our creator, has already created and cemented.  Your creator has embedded the beauty of His work in the very fabric of your DNA which can not be re-worked or re-defined.  Your emptiness and fear won’t be solved by divorce, drugs, alcohol, abortion or you fill in the proverbial blank. Our mistakes can not be washed away or re-written.  They can only be owned up to and repented from.  And so, I believe it’s time we start calling out what’s truly the problem and the problem begins with US.  The problem is pride, selfishness, SIN.  The world has a sin problem that we ourselves will not fix or change.  We preach love but if we don’t know the author of love it’s self, how do we even know what real love truly is?   As 1 John 4:19 states, “We love because he first loved us.”

Isn’t anything else we preach or teach just a counterfeit, twisted version of what love truly is or should be?  You and I, we are not God.  We may think we are wise but there in lies the danger.  Proverbs 26:12 poses this question:  “Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes?  There is more hope for a fool than for him.”

To be bluntly honest, God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts.  There is but one God and He nailed the answer to the world’s sin problem, once and for all, on the cross in the form of His son, Jesus Christ.  In repentance we must, must come to the point of accepting we are sinners in need of a savior.  God is the only way.  When death comes knocking, it won’t matter how good you were, how kind you were, how much you gave away.  It won’t matter how much you’ve acquired or how much love and unity you’ve preached from sun-up until sundown.  God is the only way.  The narrow way. Someday, whether we want to acknoweldge it or not, we will answer to the one who created all things, who created us.  What will be your answer?  What will be His?  Will He know you?

I’m a bit passionate about this because death has settled and taught me much this year.  I’m a bit passionate and perhaps more bold because there is this box of un-sifted “stuff” sitting in my basement that is the only remaining evidence of a life lived on this earth.  Most of the contents of these boxes will soon be sifted and most likely shredded and discarded.  There is nothing in these boxes of any eternal value at all.

Settle

You see,  my dad didn’t come into this world with anything and he didn’t leave taking anything with him.  He lived most his life cut-off from the world.  He was hard and distrusting and hard to live with.  He was broken but wouldn’t admit that.  He acknowledged a God, yes, but for most of His life belief in God was an unnecessary, foolish complication.  Until cancer hit.  Until death knocked.  God got a hold of him then.  When everything else including pride and self was stripped, the truth and reality of God softened his heart and brought the kind of peace that only God can bring.  Outside the hospital window the day my dad died it didn’t matter how many mistakes he had made or how many times he had gotten it all wrong and messed up.  It didn’t matter what political debate was brewing.  It didn’t matter how much money my dad’s wallet held or what kind of phone sat in his hospital drawer.  It didn’t matter who was president or would be president, just that God was dominate and supreme in his life.  The only thing that mattered in that moment was the issue of being God’s and God’s alone.  To the one about to enter through the doors of eternity, nothing else matters.

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Prayer

“Have you prayed lately”?

This was a question a dear friend asked me quite a long time ago and it has resonated with me ever since.  When the question was first posed I had gone to my friend desperate and in need of solid, real answers.  I needed solutions not another glib christian response to a problem that was beyond controllable.  At first I was angry because I viewed the “have you prayed lately” question as glib and dismissive.  It most certainly wasn’t a how-to response or the advice I had sought, but it was the advice I most needed to hear, most needed to remember.  You see, prayer is powerful.  Prayer can change circumstances but more, prayer WILL change me.  Prayer has changed me.

My view of prayer in those days had been so limited, so short-sighted.  In truth, many days it still is.  Through the years this has been the question I have turned to when everything else has failed.  This simple question is the question I ask myself when storms and trials rage like a Kansas tornado and it is also the question I too quickly and easily forget when the sun shines and chases the rain clouds away.  Praying is the single-most thing I need to do more than anything but it is nearly always my go-to last resort.

Prayer

So why don’t we pray more?

Prayer, in the face of the most difficult circumstances feels akin to an irrational grasp for comfort.  We pray for answers and meet uncomfortable silence.  So we stop praying.  Prayer doesn’t have a physical face or a tangible hand to hold on tightly to.  So we simply don’t pray.  We muddle through life grasping for answers like we grasp for straws.  We wrestle, fight, control, claw our way to the next straw until it bends and fails and then we repeat the cycle over and over again.  After all, doing something is better than not doing anything at all, right? That’s what our human nature to control everything tries to tell us.  Prayer runs counter to the fabric of human nature and reasoning and so we believe the lie that prayer is the white flag of surrender, a giving up on, a doing nothing type of answer.

Jesus had a different response.

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”  Matthew 18:20

Jesus not only taught prayer, he DID prayer.  He prayed often, for others as well as himself.   In Hebrews we are told that “in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence,” Hebrews 5:7. In Luke Jesus speaks to Simon Peter, a man who would deny Christ three times, that “Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have PRAYED for you that your faith may not fail.  And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers,” Luke 22:31-34.  These two examples, dear friends, are just the tip of the ice-berg.  Jesus’s response was so different than ours typically is and there is so much more evidence showing just how Jesus taught and lived prayer.  For a list of at least twenty-nine other references, you can click and go HERE.

Prayer is powerful. Period.

Prayer saves, prayer strengthens, prayer enables faith.  Prayer delivers us from prisons in the most unlikely of ways.  Don’t believe me?  Then go HERE and read about how a church who was praying earnestly prayed an angel to an imprisoned Peter’s side and delivered him from chains and certain death.  God walked Peter past the guards, through the city streets, and delivered him right to the praying church’s doorstep.  It was such a dramatic answer to prayer that even the people who were gathered and praying questioned Peter’s own physical knock on their door.  Prayer does that.  God, through prayer, does what we never could do or dream of period.

Are you living in a prison?

Is your marriage estranged, broken, hurting?  Do you have a rebellious, stubborn, hard-nosed kiddo that has you at the end of your rope helpless?  Are you disheartened and hurting because we live in a hurting and broken world that every day gets a little more evil, a little more unfathomable, a little more at war?  Is your prison one of your own doing, one of your own making?  Is your prison sin?  Are you tired of grasping for a new straw and watching it fall short, fail?  The denial won’t help.  The words ladies, the words we fling at our husbands in fear and frustration won’t help save a hurting marriage.  The alcohol may numb but it won’t deliver.  The drugs will only destroy your mind and your health.  Self-help books may encourage for a time, but they won’t change the course of our decisions or of those we love.  So, have you prayed lately?  If no, then stop right now and go, just go.  Get on your knees before a powerful God and humble yourself and in repentance and reverence pound and knock on the door of the only one who can truly deliver and save.  Do battle on your knees.  Let the tears fall and soak the pages and battle, wrestle in prayer.  Prayer is anything but giving up.  Prayer is surrendering what we can’t control to a God who is in control, always.  Always.

Prayer

As a side-note, if you are praying and struggling through the silence and wondering how to push through, here is a link to one of my most favorite tools and resources.  This little book has helped me through some pretty dry valleys and helped me pray through scripture when honestly, I just didn’t feel like praying.  Don’t give up on praying, keep pushing through.  I promise you won’t regret doing so!

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