From the Editor

Cycles and Seasons

STACEY MCKENZIE

Trusting God’s Word to see us through

“All people are like grass,

and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.

…The grass withers and the flowers fall,

but the word of our God endures forever” (Isaiah 40:6b, 8).

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35).

The cycles or seasons of human life are familiar to us: birth, infancy, childhood, teenage years, young adulthood, maturity, senior years, advanced age, and inevitably, death. There are all sorts of events sprinkled throughout—some joyful, some not—whether we experience them personally or are merely close to those who do. Of course, I could not create an exhaustive list of possible joys and struggles if I tried! But as familiar as we can be with the terms describing various stages of life and the types of joys or struggles that those stages can hold, we can’t know for sure what the experience of any of them will be until or unless we encounter them ourselves. And even then, there will be differences in the details; we will likely respond in diverse ways. Even within one’s own biological family, if you have one, there is divergence in how we experience—and eventually even interpret—the world. Finding genuine connections with others is special when we find them.

Similar to human rhythms, societies go through their own set of collective cycles and seasons. There are cycles of abundance, sometimes followed by food scarcity or famine and seasons of war or peace. There are times of shared national pride and times of political upheaval. In our time, our churches are filled with people who have experienced the full spectrum. In all of these cycles, whether personal or societal, the Lord has said He will be with us through it all. There is a “working out” that He is doing if we would just hold out for its unfolding as we obey His commands as faithfully as our understanding allows (Ecclesiastes 3:11; Philippians 1:6).

I often reflect on the complexity of the time we live in, where technology has made everything that may once have seemed far away visible in real-time at our fingertips. We can see and hear our neighbour’s—anyone’s—joys and struggles, whether we can relate to them in our current season or context or not (as long as they choose to make them known). Romans 12:15 encourages us to “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” It is important to slow down regularly to gain and keep God’s perspective, in Whose hands our times are held, and make room in our hearts and minds for the reality of our neighbours’ experiences—here or abroad—while doing our best to navigate our own.

New York pastor Rich Villodas understands these tensions. In his book, The Deeply Formed Life, he describes the ways he thinks believers today need to be more deeply formed in Christ so that we may be able to both experience and live out our relationship with Him and with others with the well-rounded depth that God intended.¹ The stress of these days compels a response that will benefit us and our neighbours and create (or maintain) safe spaces in our Christian circles as we represent Jesus in a chaotic world. Romans 12:12 also reminds us to be “joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” In some seasons, we may find ourselves lagging individually or corporately in any of these areas, but we have God’s promise that we will be strengthened in every season as we turn to Him (Isaiah 40:11, 28-31). May that be our sincere goal as we continue moving forward together as the body of Christ.

This article appeared in the October/November/December 2024 issue of testimony/Enrich, a quarterly publication of The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. © 2024 The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Photo © istockphoto.com.