Seasons...

As I write this on a rather balmy September evening a Forage Harvester is taking off the maize over at Marbury Hall, it’s engine forging through the crop that hasn’t seen its best over this long dry summer…and yet I am surrounded by beautiful, lush green grass here at The Vicarage that I never thought I’d see again to be quite honest.

‘There is Time for Everything’ it says in Ecclesiastes, a short book in the Old Testament that is written by a philosopher more than a theologian, whose words of poetry and prose remind us that Time doesn’t stand still.

I welcome the change in the seasons; this is one of the great things about living in this part of the world. Even though we experience changes within the seasons itself we still sense the Four Seasons that the UK and Europe have always known.

We don’t celebrate Harvest in shops and supermarkets, I expect it wouldn’t bring in as many sales as summer holiday paraphernalia and cheap Halloween tatt!

We’re far more likely to hang a ghost on our door these days than a Harvest Wreath, tell me how that works in our children’s thinking?

Turning the Wheel of the Seasons should surely be about how our lives interact with God’s Provisions, not the economics of super-powers who continue to pour rubbish into our country at every opportunity?

Surely taking a breath to stop and appreciate nature in all its glory and thanking our Creator God for the things that only He brings to us is a far more healthier lifestyle choice than any other?

I would choose to take my own Grand Children out for a walk pointing our blackberries and shiny red rose hips over a trip down the aisle at a shop anytime, to bring to their attention the natural beauty of the natural world and how God is always at work within it.

Harvest is followed by a period of Remembering in the Church as we head into November and the Winter, a time when things sleep and are restored, blessed and rested.

But I guess that won’t be promoted in our stores either! We’ll make the remarkable jump from Halloween to Christmas without a Supernatural Star or miracle of a divine birth in sight.

You bet I’m complaining because the very existence and nature of humankind is being coerced and controlled by money rather than the co-dependency of God and Mankind.

We’re missing out! You’re missing out!

God gives to every season as He holds the world in His Hands, He asks us to walk through these seasons with Him, yet we so often choose to walk without Him tempted by the shallow gods that crave our attention: money, materialism, consuming more and more - where will it all end?

Come back to God, leave worldly things behind and seek the things that last eternally. Enjoy the seasons in the way they are given to us for he made the world to turn and placed everything in its place for it to do so, and the time to appreciate it all is NOW!

Yours

Veronica x