There is An Appointed Time for Everything Under the Sun

This is a story about corn. And seasons.

And an appointed time for everything, for everything in our lives, as we live out our days under the sun.

Are you in the planting? Or the harvesting?  In the time of uprooting?

Grace to you in your season...

When my parents were still alive, I often escaped the heat of Arizona to visit their country home in Minnesota.

“The corn has tasseled,” Mom said on one of those visits, as we drove past the neighboring farms on our way to town.

I looked at the corn.

Tassels swayed above the emerald green stalks standing in attention like soldiers in the field. As a desert dweller for three decades, I hadn't spent much time thinking about the life cycles of corn.

Unlike my mom. She watched the corn grow outside her kitchen window in the two-story farmhouse where she came in 1964 with my dad and three young children under the age of five and pregnant with one more child, the beginning seed growing inside.

For fifty years she watched the corn from that window. The planting. The young stalks pushing through the dark earth, reaching for drinks of sunlight and rainwater while four children stretched tall in the Minnesota summer. Each year the tassels arrived to pollinate the corn ears, readying the plant for harvest as the kernels grew ripe and yellow.

Planting.

Growing.

Maturing.

Harvesting.

Through the cycles of the corn my parents raised a family that grew up and moved to all corners of the United States, but in the summer, we returned with our children and children's children to the home that was surrounded by corn

.In Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 the writer declares, “There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven...a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.”

I can't help but think of life’s seasons as I stand at my own window and watch the monsoon rains roll in, bringing the yearly promise of necessary moisture. I too raised four children that grew tall, but under the Arizona sun. Our youngest son is getting married in October. At 6’3” he is a stalk towering over me. When did he stretch beyond my grasp?

A fourth grandchild is due in December. A new seed sprouting. A new beginning.

I wish I could slow down time, to allow some changes and not others. But that is not the lesson I hear as I stand at my window and watch the monsoon rains. It is not the lesson my mother heard when she watched the corn.

There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven...a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. 

This post recently appeared in the Ahwatukee Foothills News, The SanTan Sun News, and the East Valley Tribune. We are past the monsoon season and are now in the season of waiting for Winter Rains.