Natural seasons are mainly known to us in the context of time.
There are 365 days in a year. This year is about to draw to a close.
Also, I turned 60 this year.
Quite unfortunately, my home church sends the sixty-year-old ones to a home group, starting from sixty and ending....with a passage to another world.
While I appreciate the opportunity and I certainly have every respect to the maturity which accompanies the advanged age with its plethora of life experience, when I was approached twice on the last weekend of November, I had to highlight this. The invitations to two groups were wonderful, but neither ticked my box.
So, what is "my box" about?
It is about not fading in life. Not everyone in a more advanced age is fading and I appreciate that. But as for me, I am still very much on the roll and not at all ready to be settled in my ways. I appreciate growth and vitality and what we might call as "the go".
What is that "go" about and why does it matter?
Years ago, a Lutheran pastor [who later became independent, then Pentecostal etc.] gave me a book by Roberts Liardon. I had already received from him three mini-books which were similarly valuable and became the trend-setters or beacons for my life.
The three mini-books were written by Kenneth E. Hagin and Kenneth Copeland and I read them over and over again. [Both were at a later stage in my life also relatively closely connected to my church. - My first church where "I became a church member again" [after a brief but intense period of ministry which begun with the approach of a Singaporean minister / evangelist / pastor / a missionary who accosted me in the foyer of his meeting hall with the words, "God is calling you! He tells you, 'Leave all and come follow me!'"] had close relations with RBTC and Kenneth E. Hagin, while my second church - which was in fact very closely related to the first one (at the beginning there was only one church incorporating both - then life took most of the original church to the States and RBTC), had Gloria Copeland visiting them years ago - before my existence at that church.
But the book written by Roberts Liardon [who is known for his call to study the revival history] was the one which was used the most by the Holy Spirit who highlighted every single revelation in it, and then built them into my spirit to the degree where I rather literally became what that book was about. So, it has been as if a testament to my life and His call upon it.
Somewhere along the trajectory He placed that "go" into me. I could not even explain it, I just knew it was there. When I talked to my unsaved family members and tried to make them understand, I might have lacked the words to help them fully comprehend it. But it was something propelling me on - and something which kept me on the move. It was very much a nomadic life at the beginning of my journey with the Holy Spirit, and later, when active in full-time ministry. [Due to circumstances, my tiny daughter grew up in ministry and accompanied me everywhere. - The Singaporean minister who had prophesied over my life did not know about her existence. - And it very much is not the way how one should enter ministry. But, it happened in my case. I did not know any better. Also, I had just met the Third Person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit and become aware of His existence. Previously, it was more of a concept.
In fact, I attended church already with my grandmother. I spent extended periods of time in her country farm and literally grew up there. She was saved. She had been both at an Adventist and Methodist church and she had a living fellowship with God. I remember the times when we - I and my three years younger brother - had grieved her with our challenging behaviour, and I heard her pouring her heart out to God under the apple tree in her orchard.
I was also a precocious child who very much grew up on her own, being mostly in her own solitary world thanks to extended stays at my grandmother's countryside place. My parents were soil scientists and spent half of the year, from spring to the end of autumn, doing the fieldwork during the warmer seasons. So, my grandmother raised me in their absence.
I learned to read at a fairly early age. By the age of five, I had read all the books in both our countryside residence, and in our apartment near the capital of the country. So, I read them twice.
My grandmother had a big Bible in an antiquated script, but it was no problem for me - I quickly learned to read it. So, I started off with page one - for it was the only way I knew how to read a book. I read the first books of Moses several times, after I ended up getting bogged somewhere in the Numbers. The long genealogies were somewhat boring for me. So, next time I started from page one again....
My grandmother tried to give me a few pointers. I remember how she tried to tell me to go into the gospel of John. I might have done that. But in my child's mind proper reading started from page one. So, I spent a lot more time in Genesis, and Exodus, and Leviticus....all the way to the genealogies in the Numbers.
My grandmother went to church every Sunday. Naturally, I was to accompany her. I remember listening to the preaching [which was not too deep - after all, it was a Lutheran church, but there was still enough to give me food for thought]. There was no children's church. All the children [not that I have any recollection of any others at church....in fact I do not even remember my brother accompanying us!] were seated in the pews and quiet during the service. I remember listening to the preaching rather intently and giving it some thought in my mind. I remember the funerals and the funeral celebration day service - which used to be a big thing in the Lutheran church, and again, listening and thinking over the heard.
Also, my father's father was an Orthodox priest. In fact, he was the high priest and I remember how our family was seated in a place of honour at his funeral with every apostolic orthodox minister lining up to shake our hands out of respect. [These are his details from the church registry books https://www.eoc.ee/vaimulik/sokolov-pavel/ - according to this, I must have been 6.4 years old at the time of his death.]
So, I did have some previous experience with God. My piano teacher was a Baptist and invited me and my family to the Christmas service. We went. [At least I and my mother did.]
Later when my piano teacher moved and my lessons took place at the Conservatory of Music, I had a habit to sneak to the services at the Baptist church. - Now, there was a major healing revival going on. But somehow I flinched and it did not touch me properly. Possibly because the rear seats had some people who had taken their bottles along, and were drinking. [I remember the sound of clinking the empty rolling bottles made when on the church floor.] The other time there was a possible altar call and I remember someone asking me to go and confess all my sin in the back room. God forbid! I certainly felt sinful and the idea of disclosing the dirty side to any living human was out of the question for me. So, the teenage years which followed, were different...
Then my grandmother died. Her funeral took place at the same Lutheran church. During the preparations I had time to talk to the minister in charge of the church. I decided to get baptised. {In fact, my first ever boyfriend who was an accomplished lawyer and also exactly nineteen and half years older than I, had a friend who identified as a witch - and he had shown her my photo, at what she said that this young lady HAD to be baptised! So, I followed that advice. It was also something which made sense to me. Something that had to be done.}
Fast forward. Life happened. By the end of my final university year I was rather spiritual...
The only thing was that I was looking for the answers from all the wrong places. I could formulate what was it what I was looking for. - I had even made my dissertation, changing the topic which would have made me focus on Nathaniel Hawthorne and the concept of sin - which was my supervising professor's suggestion...to a metaphysical theme based on Herman Melville's Moby Dick. [Clearly, a focus on sin would have got me there faster. - But my treatise was concentrated on the duality of a human being. The higher Self vs the lower self. - Which could have been seen as a rudimentary kind of an approach, if we were talking about the saved man, with the God-part and the natural part. Only, in my case it was about the natural lower self and the voice of our conscience which is also not far - based on Romans 2:15 (which shows the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts between accusing and excusing one another). Anyway, God used it. And He also used everything else I was looking into. Every spiritually wrong place became still a building brick in His Hands. - I wrote my thesis about philosophy. I was searching for what I saw as the Absolute Truth.]
So, in His due time He let me find it.
The Absolute Truth was not a concept or a theory.
The Absolute Truth was in fact a living being - His Son.
Jesus Christ.
There are times and the seasons, and He is in charge of all of these.
He certainly has been in charge of my life with its seasons.
[Even when I did not know Him the way I do now.]
Ecclesiastes 3 [NKJV]
To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
2 A time to be born,
And a time to die;
A time to plant,
And a time to pluck what is planted;
3 A time to kill,
And a time to heal;
A time to break down,
And a time to build up;
4 A time to weep,
And a time to laugh;
A time to mourn,
And a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones,
And a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace,
And a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to gain,
And a time to lose;
A time to keep,
And a time to throw away;
7 A time to tear,
And a time to sew;
A time to keep silence,
And a time to speak;
8 A time to love,
And a time to hate;
A time of war,
And a time of peace.
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