Every season of the year has its joys and its challenges. But
God has ordained them all for the benefit of His creation.
And every season of our lives has its joys and its challenges.
Yet again God has ordained all these for the benefit of His
people.
Every season of the year is important. The earth needs the
spring rains and gentle sun as tender plants germinate. It
needs the chill of autumn as growth cycles are completed
and harvests are brought in. Creation needs winter so that it
might rest and replenish from the snows. And then there is
summer – when the heat of the day and the labor of the
farmer are most intensive, so that growth can take place.
God has ordained all seasons for creation, and all are
necessary.
But your life and mine has its seasons, too. Our lives are
lived out in different modes, and each one has its own
special challenge. Sometimes we may feel quite springlike:
creative, energetic, dynamic. We may feel as though
everything is really bursting and nothing can stop us! A
springtime, refreshing and wonderful.
Or we may feel wintry: dormant, quiet, ready to hibernate.
Most of us get to the place from time to time where we just
need to sit and be quiet. Winter in your life might be a time
to go off and plan; or it may just be a time to go off, period.
Pogo Possum said it in an old cartoon, “Sometimes I sets
and thinks, and sometimes I just sets.” That’s winter in your
life.
Or maybe it is autumn for you. You are settled and doing
what you love to do, and all’s right with the world. You have
said “Yes” to the opportunities that grab you, and have said
“No” to those that do not capture you. You have established
a way of life. Autumn is a wonderful life season; it means
that you have made peace with who you are. If that’s you,
praise God and be thankful.
But it may be that for you it is not spring, with its dynamic
growth; not winter, with its time to reflect; nor autumn, with its
satisfied routine. It may be that for you it is summer, and in
summer the heat of the day and the turbulence of keeping
yourself together are too much. Too much; and your
strength is failing.
I don’t do summer very well. I have a problem with summer.
Summer for me is the season of confusion and conflict;
summer is the time of struggling to balance too many things
and deal with too many pressures. I don’t do summer very
well. I have a simmering summer season in my life.
Every summer I find that I have to do a balancing act that is
often very confusing and very frustrating. First, although
everybody is talking about vacation, the routine work of the
church has to go on. There is no stopping it. The first thing I
am going to do when I get to heaven is to ask the Lord if He
really had to put a Sunday in every single week! It would
have been nice to have had an occasional break.
Beyond the routine, human needs go on and actually even
intensify in the summer. People’s needs do not subside just
because the calendar says it is summertime; in fact, they
actually become greater. Many times I’ve been called back
from some trip because one of our frail elderly members had
succumbed. The hot weather has something to do with that.
But beyond the routine work and the intensified human
needs, I find summer frustrating because there are things
that need to be done, but church leaders are away,
committees cannot get quorums, key workers are out of
place, and we spin our wheels, with lots of effort but little to
show for it. Summer can be very frustrating!
Plus I do want to balance in my family’s need for time away; I
must balance in the work that has to be done on the house
and the yard; and I must balance in other needs, like the
need to study or the need to plan, all of it in the blistering
heat and the sweltering humidity, when I would really rather
sip lemonade in the shade! Summer is confusing,
frustrating, and a huge problem. I don’t do summer well.
But then isn’t that a picture of what happens for many of us
in our lives? We have summer seasons in our hearts. We
have times in which we find ourselves confused, battered,
pushed, pulled in a host of directions, and, in the end,
immensely unsatisfied. Don’t you feel yourself weakened
and worn, wishing you could get away, but you can’t? Tired
and drained, and nothing really is going forward because
there is too much? If you feel that, no matter what the
calendar says, that is a summer in the heart. That is, I
believe, what the Psalmist spoke of when he wrote:
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was
dried up as by the heat of summer.
When life is too much, when there are too many unresolved
conflicts, when there are too many unsettled issues, our
strength is dried up as by the heat of summer. It’s a
simmering summer season in your life.
But, praise God, this same psalmist tells us what the issue
really is and helps us deal with it. What is the real issue
when life is confusing, turbulent, frustrating, a strength-
sapping summer heat? And what may we do about it. There
are two answers in this psalm.
I
The first answer has to do with unconfessed sin. Hidden sin,
that old enemy, and our unwillingness to deal with it up front.
I hear the psalmist testifying that when he refused to deal
with the sin in his life, he lost his way, he spent his strength,
he took the heat:
While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all
day long.
“While I kept silence ...”. But when he dealt forthrightly with
this most fundamental issue, everything changed:
Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I
said, "I will confess my transgressions to the LORD," and you
forgave the guilt of my sin.
While I kept silence about my sin, my strength was dried up
as by the heat of summer.
I would guess that if I were to turn to our young people and
ask them who likes to go to summer school, I would be
answered with a deafening silence! Not many kids want to
go to summer school. It is not only that school is demanding
work when the playgrounds are calling, and it is not only that
it’s hot and tiring and boring – but, most of all, unless things
have changed from my day, going to summer school was a
badge of shame. You went to summer school because you
had failed some subject and had to take it over again.
Packing up your books and trudging off to summer school
showed every other kid on the street that you were a dummy
and a failure. Shame: you wished you could hide it. You
said as little about it as possible. You didn’t want anybody to
know your had to go to summer school.
I remember going to summer school between my junior and
senior years in high school. Somebody had persuaded me
that I ought to learn to type, and the only way I could fit it in
was to take typing during the summer – that is already going
to look like something shameful; and at the city’s trade high
school, the one for kids with no academic abilities – and that
was really going to look like something to be ashamed of.
So I went through several weeks of agony that summer,
slipping quietly off to catch the bus, hoping none of my
friends would see me, and making up vague stories about
where I was when they would come around looking for me. It
was one of the most exhausting times of my young life,
because I was trying to keep silent about what I was doing. I
was trying to hide my shame.
Oh, the psalmist has us nailed down exactly right. When we
keep silence about our sin, our strength will be dried up as in
the heat of summer. Some of us are so full of shame, and
we keep it all in here. We are not willing to trust the truth to
anyone, not even to God. We just keep moving, keep busy,
keep rolling, anything to keep from listening to our own
hearts, anything to keep from owning up to the depth of our
needs. When we keep silent about our sin, our strength is
dried up as by the heat of summer.
My father was one of those people who just had to stay busy,
even when he was on summer vacation. Every year we
would go to visit my grandmother in northern Indiana, and
after about two days there he would start rebuilding steps,
repairing the roof, clipping hedges, anything to stay busy.
That’s fine. But how many of us are frantically busy doing
this, doing that, running here and there, a thousand good
things, but it’s all so that we will not have to listen to those
inner voices that accuse us of our sin? Keeping silent about
our sin is a formula for utter exhaustion.
But praise God, there is a way out. There is a way to restore
our strength. Do not keep silence about sin. Deal with it.
Confess it. Get help with it. Get it out in the open. Take it
seriously. Mind you, I am not suggesting some fluffy little
Brittney Spears’ number, “Oops, I did it again.” I am talking
about taking the whole issue of our devious hearts to a God
who can make a difference.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I
said, "I will confess my transgressions to the LORD," and you
forgave the guilt of my sin.
Confession, exposure. Nothing less will do. If we keep
silence about our sin, our strength will be dried up as by the
heat of summer. But if we confess our sins, John says, “He
is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us
from all unrighteousness.”
II
But now there is another side to this issue. There is another
aspect to the summer season in our lives. It is not only that
we are frustrated when there is too much that we have not
dealt with, too much sin about which we have kept silence. It
is also that we have not settled on where we are going with
our lives. It is also that we have not chosen, out of all the
things that are in front of us, exactly what we are going to do.
What wearies us and saps our strength, what gives us a
simmering summer season in life, is that we have not said,
with Paul, “This one thing I do.” As someone has put it, our
witness is, “These many things I dabble at.”
A church member asked me the other day how I was doing,
and I said that there were just too many things coming at me
and too little time to deal with them all, especially since I am
committed to getting away a few days next week. She said,
“Do what you have to do and let the rest of it go.” I
thought,“Well, that’s easy for you to say, but these people
expect ....”. I went home one night after dinner had already
cooled on the table, and said to my wife, who was wondering
why I was so late, “I am trying to get everything done so that
we can have those days next week, but people keep calling
and asking for things.” And she said, “Tell them they will
have to wait.” And again I thought, “Well, that’s easy for you
to say, but these people expect ...”.
And then it hit me. I am living out of what I think others
expects of me and not out of what I know God expects of
me! I am living out of pressures that I imagine coming from
the folks who pay the bills, but not out of the heart of Him
who told me not to be anxious, for He had clothed the birds
of the air and the beasts of the field. If my strength is gone
because I am in a simmering summertime of the spirit, it is
because I live too much out of what I think others want from
me, and too little out of what I know God wants of me.
That’s what makes a simmering, confusing, frustrating
summer season in my life. Maybe it does in yours too.
Maybe it is what the psalmist is hearing when the Lord says
to him,
I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will
counsel you with my eye upon you. Do not be like a horse or a
mule, without understanding, whose temper must be curbed with
bit and bridle.
I will instruct you the way you should go. Brothers and
sisters, when we trust God to teach us what to do with our
lives, and it is no longer just succumbing to the pressure of
what everyone else thinks we should do – or worse, what we
think everyone else thinks – we will discover that our
strength returns, that the heat of the moment does not
destroy us, and that we are refreshed.
What frustrates us? What puts the heat on us? It is not only
that we have kept silence about our sin; it is also that we
have not listened to the Lord’s instruction, but have listened
to every other clamoring voice instead. And the end is
nothing but strength dried up as by the heat of summer.
There was another time that I went to summer school. It was
quite different from the first time. The first time, as I have
told you, was while I was in high school. And it felt like
something I wanted to keep silence about. No self-
respecting kid wanted to be known as taking typing in the
summertime at the trade high school. That was an
exhausting summer.
But the second time I went to summer school came right
after I had graduated from the university. After twelve years
of public school and five years of university study, wouldn’t
you think I would want a break? Wouldn’t you have
expected I would want to cool my heels on some beach and
air out my frazzled brain? But what did I do? Forty-eight
hours after receiving my university diploma, I was sitting in a
theological seminary classroom, eager to get started. In a
hurry to start my ministry training. Rushing to be about what
I knew the Lord was telling me to do. And it was a totally
different feeling this time. It was not shameful, but
exhilarating. It was not exhausting, but fulfilling. The
psalmist got it right:
I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will
counsel you with my eye upon you. Do not be like a horse or a
mule, without understanding, whose temper must be curbed with
bit and bridle.
There are a thousand good things you can do at any season
of life. But there are only a few that are really worth your
total efforts. About these the Lord will instruct you. Listen,
and you will hear His voice. Be silent, and you will know.
You will be refreshed.
The week before last, on the hottest day of the year, I
decided to go to the Mall to see the Folklife Festival. I
trudged under the burning sun from tent to tent, from display
to exhibit to concert to craft show. After a while, I felt weak.
The heat of the summer day was taking its toll. I had thought
I wanted to see everything. When I go to an exhibit, I feel
that I have to see everything there and read every label. But
on this day, I realized I was not taking it in. I was too tired
and too hot. My strength was dried up as by the heat of
summer.
And so I broke the silence. I admitted to myself that my own
strength was not sufficient. I cut short my wanderings and
hurried over to the Art Gallery, where I knew it would be cool,
where I could eat and drink, and where there was another
exhibit to see. The exhibit? “In Quest of Immortality”
My summer season is over. I broke the silence; I
acknowledged my failure. I stopped my wanderings. The
Lord, the immortal, the eternal, whose hand is on my life and
whose heart is ever bent toward me, had instructed me. And
I am refreshed.
