The heat of Summer

Seasons... everything and everyone goes through them. At the moment I'd say I am just about to enter the summer of the past three years of chemo and cancer treatments. Winter was a year and a half to two years ago, and the spring time has been this past year as my body has gotten used to the side effects of the chemo and it has been actually working.

I have no idea how long summer will last, but like all things it will be a season. Summer will bring with it it's own challenges that Winter, Spring, and Fall don't have. There are some ways in which the other seasons are easier than this one. That is also because each season involves change. There is a time in each of the seasons where I pause and say, "It's now a new season." I might not see it coming, I might not see it going, but I can tell when I'm there.

Lisa and I have been transplanted here to Houston and we have spent literal seasons here, and we are approaching a new season here spiritually as well. This is something I've been thinking about. Is Houston our "hard seasons" city? We are looking forward to spending a summer in Colorado Springs and Seattle, and at the same time I am wondering if we aren't "shipping off our fruit" as it were. I think we did this in Seattle after my first seasons of cancer. We jetted to Colorado Springs as soon as summer arrived... and it looks like we're doing something like that again.

Am I, are we, cutting out a vital part of our relationships with people by cutting out too soon? I assume God knows best where to "deliver" the fruit that has been growing in us these past few seasons. I just wonder sometimes if my will to "survive" and "be alive" might be a louder, stronger voice than what God, the farmer, wants to do with me, the tree.

Please Lord, help me to not forget in the heat of Summer what I fought so hard for in the dead of Winter and the growth I have gained along the way. Help me to be nourishment to others no matter where we end up, and shade for the weary who are in different seasons than I am in right now. Use this tree Lord.

~B.
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