Changing Seasons

Truly for the first time this year, it's going to be sunny and hot all weekend here in Oklahoma. That means that we're well on our way out of spring and heading into summer. While the weather isn't necessarily the same from year to year, we can count on the seasons changing...just like they do in our lives.

Did you see the movie Gladiator? It's one of my all-time favorites. It's the story of a man who goes through many seasons in his life. The tag-line is "The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor." After being betrayed by the emperor's son, Rome's best general has his family murdered and is left for dead. He ends up back in Rome, though, as a gladiator and ends up avenging his family and restoring Rome back to what it was under the previous emperor. Don't get me wrong, vengeance isn't in keeping with Jesus' teachings but this story does illustrate how we can go from one extreme to the other in our lives. There will be good times and there will be bad times, but like all things of this Earth, they are only temporary.

Things don't usually go as planned, and they definitely aren't always going to go well. But just like the seasons, the bad times will also pass. It's in those times when we need to focus our reliance on God and trust Him to pull us out of darkness and bring us into our next season.