God in the Garden: God Works in His Time
Posted in Everything else on 12/01/2011 05:30 am by adminToday I have a guest post for you from my good friend, Laura Solano of Cozy Tops (she’s the one who organized our hat-making venture for the Period of Purple Crying campaign, and she makes the loveliest of baby hats for sale here). She is the gardener-in-charge of the Quinault Community Garden (although she wouldn’t appreciate my calling that attention to her, but I’m just calling it like I see it), and she has written this month’s essay on God in the Garden: God Works in His Time. For previous essays, see “God is Good” and “God is Faithful.”
Thank you, Laura, for allowing me to share your essay!
God Works in His Time:
“The LORD is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” 2 Peter 3:9
I love the season of Advent, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas. The waiting, the anticipation of the Christmas joy is tempered by the reminder that even as we remember Christ’s first coming as Immanuel the Lamb, we still wait for His second coming as Judge and Lion. We have been waiting now for two thousand years and the wait seems long. And yet—our impatience is selfishness. Peter assures us in his second letter that “with the LORD one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day” (3:8). What great patience! And the truly wonderful thing is that God’s patience is not for the sake of virtue, but for OUR sake. Indeed, “the patience of our LORD [is] as salvation” (2 Peter 3:15).
God is the good Father and He delights in teaching us to be like Him. Winter, like Advent, teaches us patience. Advent coincides with the shortest days of the year and the beginning of winter. I often wish that we could skip winter altogether and jump straight from autumn to spring. But it is precisely the misery of winter, the cold, the ice, the dead-looking vegetation, that causes my jubilation in the first crocus sighting of spring.
Winter helps us learn not only patience but also the goodness of God’s faithfulness. Spring does follow winter every year and it arrives in God’s perfect timing.
As we wait for warmer weather, let’s enjoy learning godly patience and anticipate the faithfulness of spring.
12/01/2011 at 2:16 pm
I am sooo grateful for God’s patience! I have certainly tried it many times. Fall and Spring are my favorite seasons of the year as well, but I think we appreciate them all the more because of the misery of winter and the scorching of summer. So basically, I’m thankful for all the seasons. Sometimes in Texas we do sort of skip over a season, so it’s nice when we can see them all.
Thank you, Laura, for your insights.