Dying to Leave

“All flesh is as grass,
And all the glory of man as the flower of the grass.
The grass withers,
And its flower falls away.”

1 Peter 1:24 (NKJV)

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The wide open fields of the Dakotas and Montana are almost breath-takingly beautiful to me.

It was said of my Grandmother Todd that she had a “green thumb”. What that meant was she had a knack for getting things to grow. Her little yard in the middle of greater Norfolk Virginia was a little Garden of Eden. There were very few spaces you could walk that did not have living proof of her loving green thumb touch.

Though a busy life does not allow me the time needed to use it like I would like, I think I inherited a bit of my grandmother’s green thumb touch. Watching things grow is sheer joy to me. And amazingly, now I live in the middle of a garden that is almost as large as the original thirteen colonies that started this amazing experiment we call the United States of America.

When I heard the words of America the Beautiful it means so much more to me now – I live in the middle of one of the verses! I see it weekly…

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

However, something I’ve learned living here in this beautiful northern garden is that the growing season is so much shorter. However, the farmers and ranchers have learned to make everyday count. It seems that almost every weekend when Sonja and I head out to a different part of the Region that something new and different is growing. One weekend we will see flowing fields of grain and then corn and then fields of canola and then later acres and acres of sunflowers solemnly following the daily trajectory of the sun.

Bottom line, the short growing seasons are like cumulus clouds quickly blowing across a summer sky one after another. And then comes winter…and the growing season is over.

This reminds me often of the transitory nature of human life. No matter how many decades we can claim, the “growing season” for we humans is short…here today and gone tomorrow.

And that leads me to the topic of today’s Saturday briefing…”Dying to Leave.”

Eventually, every assignment comes to an end. Whether you are a minister or miner or a preacher or painter, eventually your growing season will be over and the harvest gathered and the tally taken.

The question I deal with in today’s Saturday briefing is: “What would it look like for you, and more importantly, your family, if God’s plan for your transition from your current assignment was death?” It happens more than you think and, in the short and transient life that we live on this planet, there is no promise that it will not happen to you.

I hope you will take a few moments and hear what I have to say about it. I’ve given some very practical things to do to be prepared for that possibility which will help your family, not only survive, but eventually thrive.

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