If you have been reading “Love Notes” for a while, then you already know one of my favorite activities with Poppy (Runner Duck) is worm hunting. We walk together every day, looking under mats, buckets, boards and rocks for delicious worms and sticky slugs, yum.
Poppy follows closely and quacks loudly when she sees the object I’m starting to lift. I think she is saying, “Yes, there! Hurry, hurry!”
In the Spring, we find long, fat earthworms, skinny red-wigglers and even a few stray night crawlers. There are usually a few crickets, millipedes and beetles under the shelter and shade of the rocks as well. Poppy ignores the crunchy snacks and gobbles up the sweet, juicy worms. Until Summer…
As the ground gets drier, hotter and harder, the worms go deeper underground – and they are much harder to find. Poppy makes a high pitched quack when she peeks at the worm-less dirt under the rock, “Where did they go?!”
She settles for the crunchy snacks and eats up the crickets and beetles.
There are seasons of abundance in our lives. Blessings flow freely and we are overwhelmed and overjoyed with health and life. Families are strong, finances are stable, friends are faithful… Fill your spiritual-emotional buckets during these seasons! Journal your thanks and praise. Give glory and LIFT your praise high to the one from whom all blessings flow.
When the seasons change (and in my 50+ years, my experience is that the seasons WILL change) and life brings disappointments, illness, challenges… you have the resources in your “bucket” to make it through. These are the seasons for LEANING hard on the One who loves you the most, who softens the blows and restores your strength.
Poppy accepts the hard shelled bugs and moves on to the next rock or mat with me. She never stops hunting. She is always moving forward. We need to do that too.
Even when the season is undesirable and we want to give up… there are more rocks to turn over, more mats to lift, more seasons ahead, more life to live, more souls to reach, more of our amazing God to discover … more. Lift and Lean. Keep. Going. ❤
“Being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you might have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.” Col.1:11-12.
