Sometimes you can be going through a bit of a rough patch in life – a bit like a famine or a drought – and you wonder to yourself what God is up to? But sometimes, sometimes God is actually sitting there, waiting for YOU to do something.
It's just fabulous to be together again at the start of a new week. Can I ask you, what do you want to get out of life? I mean when you stand back and survey the landscape called, "your life", the highs and the lows, what are some of the things that you'd love to see there? Relationships, achievements, family, career, money, a promotion, holiday? We're all different, but basically my hunch is that we kind of want the same sorts of things in life.
We want health and happiness and fulfilment and a sense of belonging and a sense that we're needed, hope, a future. They're the main things aren't they? In a sense we want a harvest out of life, sure we expect to put in, sometimes we put in too much, other times not enough. But we want to get something out of life. Hmmm … a harvest!
Back to your life for a minute, your landscape, the things that you're looking for - are they there? Are you reaping the harvest in your life that you're really hoping for? And if not, why not?
I love going to lookouts, you get up high on a mountain somewhere and you look out over the hills and the valleys below and the green fields. There's one in particular I have in mind that I love going to, it's got these beautiful rolling green fields and you can see the ocean and the beaches in the distance. And yet if you look a little bit further you can see some great factory belching smog out into the atmosphere, and you can look over to the left and the sun will be shining over here and over to the right there's a storm going.
It's something really uplifting to look out at the good and the bad and the ugly, and it's the same when we look at the landscape of life. When we stop and we get up on a vantage point and look across our lives, it's like looking at this landscape from the lookout, all the bits and pieces.
Life's like that landscape, there's the good and the bad and the ugly and in some parts of our lives there's sunshine, fabulous! And you look in another part of your life and there's storm clouds and thunder and lightning and rain. All the different parts of life, family and how we feel inside, our contentment and security and the friends we have and the work we do, all those bits.
What do we want out of life? Peace, health, love, pretty basic things actually, and you look at that landscape and maybe in one or two areas those basic things can be missing.
You know what I'm talking about. Maybe marriage is not everything it's cracked up to be; maybe work you're so sick to death of it, it's boring, the routine the humdrum; maybe inside you just feel a lostness or a downness that you don't understand why. We go through these things, these are life, and they can happen right alongside, right in parallel with, right at the same time as the other good things.
I can be having a fantastic relationship with my wife and not enjoying my work, or visa versa. Or both of those are fine but one of our kids is having some trouble at the moment. We want to have good harvests in our life, but sometimes right now, it's not what we want it to be. And before we can have a harvest we need to plant a seed.
There's a great story, if you have a Bible you can read it later, you can go to Genesis Chapter 26, right at the beginning of the Bible. By the way if you don't have one you can go to a website. Biblegateway is the website, and you can read all sorts of different translations of the Bible on-line, good website. Anyhow, you can read about it.
It's a story of Isaac who was Abraham's son, Abraham was the father I guess, of the nation of
