A Time For Everything

To describe the beauty I saw on the way to work today might raise eyebrows; after all it is winter. It’s that time of year when blue skies seem predominantly replaced with gray, trees become exposed in a nakedness of brown and the ground becomes a desert of dormant grass or it is sheathed in a blanket of white snow. You could say perhaps that this neck of the woods is beginning a bit of a seasonal recess that warrants no closer look around because it is all so seemingly the same. Is it the same? Has nature truly taken a recess?
My ride to work is about 45 minutes. Most of my ride is through the country. I suppose that might seem boring to some yet for me-the drive gives me time to think and reflect on things; it often finds me being the listener, so the quietness of this rural drive allows God my undivided attention except for those instances I need to steer myself back onto the road.
In all this wintry dullness that surrounds me I’ve come to realize that the seasonal retreat God has mapped out in nature is not a recess at all. Looking around I see things that I hadn’t before. I question whether what I see has always been there or did I just never notice? As I continue to look I see the plain brown trees are highlighted with fresh snow, I see the little rabbit next to a blue spruce tree, I see a beautiful red fox trotting across a plowed, snow-covered field, I see the pheasant in the brush along the roadside, I see an old red barn barely standing and fallen boards amongst the weeds that surround it and I begin to get the picture-the picture God wanted me to see.
Each season is a time for the usual to step aside and an opportunity for the next to present itself. It’s an opportunity for the seemingly less important, more obscure to shine. So it goes with this life. We allow ourselves to get wrapped up in the things we think are important yet ignore and give little time to too many of the things that are important to God.
The seasons in nature were created to step aside and let all of God’s work have some time to show their colors, goodness and beauty. It is my prayer that those of us in all our vanity, humbly step aside a little more often and allow God to present “front and center” all the beauty and goodness we sometimes keep hidden behind us.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1