:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

Taking Root is a series of meditations I’m writing and editing for Central Vineyard Church during the season of Lent. You can download a podcast for each day of Lent by subscribing to my church’s podcast or visiting the podcast blog for each day of the series.

Strawberries only grow in the summer up north. That’s nothing all that shocking, but if we can understand the implications of this, we are on the verge of planting a seed of an idea that can change our lives.

It really all starts with strawberries.

It never occurred to me that strawberries have a limited growing season. When I realized that my winter supply of strawberries has always been shipped in from places like California, I had a striking revelation.

In the past, people couldn’t eat strawberries out of season. Think about that. Millions of people were deprived of this heaven-sent berry, a top five fruit along with blueberries, for ten or eleven months of the year. A bland honeydew or tart apple doesn’t get the job done like a strawberry.

How in the world did God think it was a good idea to give apples such a long season and to keep the strawberry season so short?

My strawberry theology crisis aside, strawberries have their limits. When weather cools down, strawberries just can’t grow. It’s impossible to grow strawberries in the winter. The plants need their in-season and off-season time in order to produce fruit.

My own distance from farming has kept me from noticing how seasons work with my food, but we don’t need to look far before we start noticing seasons. From the changing of leaves, to the various sports leagues, to shows on network television and cable—our lives are ordered around seasons.

In some respects we are swept along with the seasons of life such as childhood and adulthood, but in my own life I’ve found that two things tend to happen:

1. I fight the arrival of a new season.

2. I fail to notice the need to change seasons on my own.

Either way, there’s a rhythm built into creation. Fighting against the rhythm of seasons can leave us feeling uprooted—a confused chaos of uncertainty and stress.

Fighting a New Season

Sometimes I want to keep things just as they are, fearing a change or even a leap into the dark that a new season brings. While we can fight off seasons in the grocery store and import our strawberries, we can’t stop people from changing, growing up, or moving on. Each change of season brings some losses and fresh opportunities.

Failing to Change Seasons on My Own

Sometimes we can push on in our lives as if we aren’t living in seasons. We can keep working, keep seeking the same entertainment, and keep using our free time in the same ways. Our lives become these predictable patterns that may be disappointing sometimes, but the up side is the predictability.

While some seasons creep up on us and we have to eventually figure out how to survive, these self-imposed seasons are far more challenging. Breaking these patterns and habits can be tough because we don’t see the urgency. Aren’t things working out just fine?

The problem is that our lives are generally moving at the pace of a sprint, running at top speed, trying to squeeze every last drop out of each day, but life is a marathon that demands different paces. Recognizing life as a series of seasons frees us to grow, change, and transition with the different seasons of life. Without seasons, we deprive ourselves of self-reflection and keep pushing on, adding more and more until we snap.

Unless we force ourselves to step back from our well-worn and familiar patterns, we’ll have a hard time figuring out what may be holding us back from going deeper with God. Christians recognized this dilemma, so they created a season before Easter that forces us to do just that.

Indulging in God in the Season of Lent

Lent is a Christian season that aims to point out the ways we’ve drifted from God and gives us the tools to restore a healthy balance. We don’t deprive ourselves of food or pleasure as a religious observance per se. Rather, we’re creating room so that we can splurge on God.

Lent is a season of feasting on Christ’s presence in our lives, and therefore we remove something significant as a way of creating time where God can work in us. We don’t give these things up for all time but merely for a season. Then we can restore our lives to their proper order with Christ in his place as Lord of all.

As you consider how to create space for God during this season, I encourage you to ask God to reveal one thing that gets in the way of your relationship with him. It may be food, a game, a habit, or a lifestyle choice. Even something as simple as turning off your phone or computer for a set period of time each day and meditating in a quiet space can make Lent a productive season of recuperation and rest.

Resting for a season sows a seed within us that starts to hint at what we were made to do and where we are going. If we want the fruits of hope, joy, and peace that God brings, we need to start with this seed of thinking seasonally, of giving something up for a set period of time.

By entering a season of rest, we’ll find that God has promised us sweet things for the future. Even those sweet things, much like biting into juicy summer strawberries, will pass away as we enter a new season. Whether it is a season of plenty or a time of want, may our one constant be an abundance of God’s presence in our lives.

The Greenhouse

We usually think about Lent as a make or break time of fasting. It’s like a New Year’s resolution for Christians. Failure seems inevitable. It’s so big and drastic, who can keep it up for 40 days?

While I still encourage you to change a habit or practice in your life so that you can create more space for God, each day of this series we’re going to provide a list of practices that you can test out. Think of these practices as experiments that may or may not work. You’re just sticking these idea seedlings into your life to see what sprouts.

Maybe these idea seeds will grow into something significant, but we’re not interested in creating something huge here. We’re testing some things out, and then we’ll leave the next step up to God’s Spirit in your own life. Here are some idea seeds you can try out today:

Look at the past 5-10 years of your life. Have you moved in and out of any personal seasons?

Look up the church calendar at www.explorefaith.org. Take 5 minutes to reflect on what it means to think seasonally about spiritual growth and discipleship. Write down your observations.

While on vacation with our family last week I gave frequent updates on the past year, and I realized something.

The past year wasn’t the worst. That kind of surprised me. In fact, a lot of great things happened. And then again, I certainly hit my fair share of set backs that cast a shadow over things—hence my surprise.

During this time last year, where did I expect to be in a year’s time? The answer: Well, not quite where I am right now. And now, where do I expect to be next year at this time?

I can live with my lack of progress because life is more than a long to-do list. I need to look at something bigger than my goals.

This isn’t a matter of painting a bulls-eye wherever my arrows land. Rather, I’m talking about the delicate balance of having goals and remembering the larger relational picture of life. Over the past year my daily quality of life has improved and my wife and I have found time to be together in midst of some pretty crazy schedules.

All in all, we’re doing fine, and that is something to be thankful for.

On the Christian end of things, I think I can get caught up in meeting all kinds of goals as well, craving certain spiritual milestones. You know, stuff like being free from a nagging sin, hearing God more clearly, or reading a certain amount of scripture. Christians usually think they don’t pray enough, and we’re usually moving somewhere between the extremes of despairing over our sin or excusing it.

I like the idea of aiming for Christian maturity, and I’ll speak about that more this week, but as far as goals go, I think it’s important to begin any discussion of them from the standpoint of what’s most important.

When I consider my goals as a Christian, I find myself balancing the desire to be more holy or spiritual, but not listing the goal over the relationship with God that will ultimately lead me to that level of holiness or spirituality. In other words, working toward the goals can overshadow the means by which we attain them—namely through intimacy with Christ.

It can be frustrating to struggle with sin or to find that you’re not quite as far along in your Christian walk as you’d like, but we don’t move forward by setting a goal and then working on it without the relationship with Christ in place. I’m learning that the best way forward is not always what seems to be the most direct…

This week I’m posting on a series of books that proved particularly life-changing for myself. They are ordered according to the chronology of my own experiences with them, and I am focusing in particular on the ones that still come to mind in my day-to-day life. I’ll begin with A Celebration of Discipline.

I ran into Richard Foster’s classic A Celebration of Discipline while in college. I dabbled with it a little bit while I was dating my soon-to-be wife and mentioned to her that I thought I could benefit from a little more discipline in my life.

Heck. OK, I was totally smitten by her and really needed some help keeping it together during our long-distance relationship. Fresh out of my teen years I craved discipline, a deeper spirituality, and fellowship with God. She bought me Foster’s book for my birthday.

I eagerly dove into Foster’s book and discovered a God I could delight in while denying myself. Foster showed me a way to pursue Christ without straying into performance Christianity or legalism.

At a time in my life when I soon left my friends from college, struggled to adjust to life back at home, and set the course for the rest of my life through seminary and beyond, I took great comfort in the practices of Christianity as described by Foster. Those years of my life were certainly turbulent and very emotional, but Foster provided a series of anchors.

Many Christians today know more about business gurus and other secular trends than Christian tradition, and that makes me terribly sad. In addition, many churches want to learn from the best of the business world, organizing their churches according to the top wisdom of this world.

While I see the logic in that, I’d much rather belong to a church that’s a bit more disorganized and a lot more plugged in to the disciplines that have stood the test of time for good reason rather than whatever tops the bestseller list for a few weeks before being sent to the bargain bin or the pulping factory. Richard Foster is one author who can help the church today cultivate the inner life with God’s Holy Spirit that we need.