SEASONS

The other day I wrote about the way some people look for answers to their problems in the pages of Scripture as if God's word was some ancient Magic 8 Ball. 

This is not to imply that God cannot give us personal direction from His word, just that it is not wise to go cherry picking passages on which to base our choices. 

In the mid-90s, I was a few years out of college and working in LeMars, Iowa as a youth pastor. I had been in town for three and a half years and the church was having financial difficulties. My job had been reduced to a half-time position. 

I had taken on some hours at the local high school, patrolling the parking lot before the first bell and after the last and monitoring the study hall for several periods in between. 

To this day it remains one of the worst jobs I ever held.

One snowy morning I was on parking lot duty with my walkie talkie, doing my best to discourage any teenage driving hijinks, when I looked down to see something so mundane that it caught my attention.

I was walking over my own tracks in the snow - from the looks of it, for about the fifth or sixth time. My current tracks were indistinguishable from my earlier ones. It struck me that I was walking in circles and getting nowhere in particular, both literally in the parking lot and figuratively in life and ministry. 

Just then I became conscious of the honking of geese overhead. When I looked up, there was a great column of geese in the sky, the overlapping V formations stretching from one horizon to the other. 

Thousands of birds were passing over me for the next ten minutes and then these words popped into my head:

"To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

And in that moment, I knew God was telling me that it was time to move on. 

I didn't know it at the time, but my next stop was going to be Asbury Theological Seminary, one of the best moves of my life.