Facing an anxious new season

I spend my workday at a window overlooking our landlord’s four cows. The cows lead simple lives—simplified, I suppose, by their unsophisticated destinies. They will travel invariably from pasture to butcher to freezer wrap. Rather than passing summer and winter in personal risk and bold activity, summer and winter will pass them. As I write on this bright March morning, I almost envy these cows. For I am facing something the happy cows will never have to: a question mark at the end of a life-season.

When we came to Virginia after our honeymoon last May, we underestimated the sweat of moving. By the time we had finally emptied our boxes, I told my mother she would have to visit me here indefinitely because we were never moving again. But like the woman who forgets her labor for the joy of having a child, here we are, ready to move. In two short months my husband will graduate from college. The consequent onslaught of pragmatic considerations fills half my heart with a perky hope. The other half bends to readiness like the last dodgeball player left on his side of the court, grievously outnumbered.

The cows in the yard do not have to move from here. They do not research rental properties and jobs, or consider which church they will attend, or feel for all the world that they are playing in the Game of Life rather than living in the real one. But I do. And because I do, I read the Bible for comfort.

In 1 Samuel 7, the Israelites receive a message that the Philistines will soon attack—a circumstance considerably worse than mine. But the solution to their difficulty matches mine perfectly—if not in substance, in symbol. The people of Israel cry to their prophet, “Do not cease to cry out to the LORD our God for us, that he may save us from the hand of the Philistines.” So Samuel offers a nursing lamb as a burnt offering. The Lord answers his cry, routing the Philistines before Israel. Like the Israelites, I can cry to God for help in immediate trouble because the Lamb—God’s Son—was sacrificed for me.

This new season won’t mark the first time God has helped me—has put a roof over my head, clothes on my back, money in my pocket, gas in my car, or air in my lungs. How can I feel anxious when God has never failed me? Like Samuel, I must stamp a new name over my place and life, an Ebenezer: “Till now the Lord has helped me.”

And if my future with God looks anything like my past with God has looked, He will set His plans in motion without the assistance of my anxiety. So maybe I can learn a lesson from the cows we will soon be leaving. My destiny is, of course, somewhat reversed from theirs. I move unalterably from God’s care on Earth, to death, to joy in God’s presence. So maybe, like them, I should sit down in the sun of God’s kindness and munch some hay.