A reflection on passing seasons

As September lives up to its promise of plummeting temperatures, I receive this email from a Pennsylvania friend transplanted in West Palm Beach, Fla.:

“But I see our own temps starting to drift downward. High of 87 tomorrow. It’s interesting, this nostalgia for coolness. You try to remember the last time you opened a window, or thought you might need a jacket. You almost forget that it is ever any different than it is right now.

“I wonder how much of life is like that. I have the safeguard of a calendar to tell me that it simply cannot stay hot forever. But other seasons? (This is no new thought, I know.) I really do wonder how much of life I spend lamenting some condition (dryness, loneliness, uncertainty, to name a few), but it is as temporary as the summer heat. Not pleasant, but temporary.

“God doesn’t choose to reveal when those kinds of seasons will end, I guess that’s what walking by faith is for. But their end is every bit as definite as the end of summer (unless you ask Al Gore). I’m thinking out loud, and practicing expressing myself at the same time. This is not revolutionary—unless one practices it. If I lived conscious of the end of all the things under which I suffer, how would it change the way I act, talk, even feel?”

How many times the Word of God reminds His children that all their troubles—and joys!—are soon to pass away. The time is short, we are told, therefore let those who are married be as though they were not, etc. The sufferings of this present life are not worth comparing to the glories awaiting us, etc.

A little-noted observation about meteorological seasons is their possible benefit, even on a purely unconscious level, in reminding us that life moves on—and breathtakingly quickly, at that. Are you tired of the summer heat? Wait a minute. Will you become weary of the winter blizzards too? Just wait. The one thing I should think we do not want to do is enter heaven dragging the wood, hay, and stubble of a thousand small complaints for things that so soon passed away that in the light of heaven we will blush to think we had paid them any mind at all.