Between the feast and the famine

It has been a little soggy here in corn and bean country this spring.

Fields that are usually sprouting neat little rows of the summer crop have not even been plowed over.

And quite honestly, a lot of them look like they have sprouted rivers and ponds instead of the stuff we rely on around here to feed our families and keep the economy going.

Over the weekend as we dried out from a soccer game played in the pouring rain and saw the forecast of more rain through the coming week, Russ reminisced about a time several years ago when we were all praying for rain.

It was a drought year on top of a drought year and people were desperate enough for rain that they started calling us together for prayer meetings.

We attended one that was so strange to our normal way here even for us who live as followers of Christ.

One of the leaders of the agricultural community called a prayer meeting and farmers and citizens and a collection from all walks of life and faith backgrounds showed up and we prayed and we asked God for rain.

The weather forecasters had predicted another dust bowl and it certainly appeared we were headed that way.

But we prayed.

And apparently the drought ended, because I had totally forgotten about the whole threat until Russ mentioned it.

One of the down sides of living in a land or a season where things are just going well and nothing really too terrible is shaking things up is that we are forgetful people.

We fail to heed the warning

11-16 Make sure you don’t forget God, your God, by not keeping his commandments, his rules and regulations that I command you today. Make sure that when you eat and are satisfied, build pleasant houses and settle in, see your herds and flocks flourish and more and more money come in, watch your standard of living going up and up—make sure you don’t become so full of yourself and your things that you forget God, your God,
the God who delivered you from Egyptian slavery;
the God who led you through that huge and fearsome wilderness,
those desolate, arid badlands crawling with fiery snakes and scorpions;
the God who gave you water gushing from hard rock;
the God who gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never heard of, in order to give you a taste of the hard life, to test you so that you would be prepared to live well in the days ahead of you.
17-18 If you start thinking to yourselves, “I did all this. And all by myself. I’m rich. It’s all mine!”—well, think again. Remember that God, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors—as it is today.
Deuteronomy 8: 11-18 The Message

We are indeed forgetful people until things get disrupted enough to gain our attention.

Oh to remember in the best of seasons to live with gratitude to God from whom all blessings flow and to cry out to Him with the same desperation our need for Him is worthy of before we are living in a flood or a drought and realize how far we have removed ourselves from Him.

That is the goal…

to reduce the cycle of forgetfulness so that in all seasons we are mindful that all things are from His hand.

Every good gift and every perfect gift comes down to us from above…from God the Father…who never changes nor shifts. There are no shadows in Him…only pure Light and Life….
James 1:17 my paraphrase <3

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