Too old now to stop rocking away

We have a couple of white rocking chairs. They're sturdy things, well built, and almost impossible to sit in for a long period of time because they're built so straight up and ungiving. But they go with us everywhere we go.

Why? They are sources of memory, and they are a look into the future.

Memory? They sat on my mother's front porch for years, till she passed and we sold the house that might have been my comfort in retirement. Future? I want to be sitting in some rocking chairs somewhere on the planet one day with my dear Mary. I gave her a picture of two rocking chairs on a porch years ago for our anniversary, signifying in my mind that I wanted to be sitting with her there one day.

Life, I believe, comes at us in seasons. Nothing is stagnant. Change is a part of all we are, all we do. Nothing stays the same. What happened in winter doesn’t last till fall. There’s a song on the radio as I write this that has a line something like this: The batter swings and the summer flies.

Sure seems that is the way it happened. One day I sat down in the rocker on my porch and the next, the winds were blowing cold and it was almost time to take the rocker in for the dead of winter. It seems that it was really just a day or so ago that I was young enough to swing a bat and run like the wind. A slow wind, admittedly. The joints were flexible. Summer was fun.

Seasons change.
The summer flies.
And I’m here. Looking back.

God is there through the seasons. There’s the freshness of spring where God works to help us understand our newness in him, where the rains are sweet and we don’t mind being damp one bit.

There’s the white-hot excitement of summer where God leads us into territory with Him we never knew or dreamed of. We long for the mercy that comes with each morning. We long to grow. We want to know him, and we don’t know how to pull that off.

There’s the peace of fall, where the wind is gentle and the air is light. There is no peace, no love like God’s. We begin to understand what the relationship with Jesus really means. How do we live with daily contact with a savior who we can’t see or feel? How do we live with a relationship with the unseen?

And there is the winter of bleakness, where we struggle with death and loss, where things aren’t what we thought they would be, where that relationship we so longed for simply can’t be found.

Each step of the way, there is God. God in the days. God in the nights. God with us in our loneliness. God with us in our joys.

His footprints are easy to see, but more often than not, we see them after we’ve walked through the season.

Oh, Not everyone has my background, my problems, my worries, my woes. Not everyone has gone through addiction, lived through Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, lost love ones to cancer.

But everyone has someone or been someone who has had some problem like those in a dark time and come screaming into the sunshine of joy on the other side.

Somewhere in the balancing of the pain of life and the love of God is where we live, not as stained glass portraits but as flesh-and-blood it’s happening to me today God people.

There's a line or two in a song my son, Jason, wrote and recorded called Too Old Now that says, "Grew up to find nothing every goes your way. But I'm too old now to stop dreaming my life away. Remember when we thought our hopes weren't pretend. All of our beginnings didn't seem like the end. Sorry for the excuses. Sorry for the daydreams I can't give up yet. "

So where am I? What season am I in?

On the porch, rocking away, watching the summer fly by.