How will you turn out in the tough times?

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In the world of nature, we only really find out whether a tree is evergreen when the season turns to winter.  Throughout all the other seasons, to the untrained eye, it can be hard to tell the difference between those trees that will eventually shed their leaves and those that will keep them. Yet once the sun fails to climb quite as high in the sky and the temperature drops, the truth begins to emerge. When winter sets in, it soon becomes clear which trees have kept hold of their leaves and which have not.

And so it is, too, with us. Perhaps we do not really know what we are made of until we encounter a little winter in our lives. When things are at their toughest, when life feels at its most frail, that is when we really find out what kind of people we are. Can we remain evergreen and still able to keep singing in the deep dark of winter? 

Hard Words

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Do you remember the famous song from Mary Poppins: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Many of us could say it or even sing it, but what about spelling it? That is easy; some would say, ‘I…T’! That is how I’d respond in my classroom, much to the dismay of an annoyed teenager! In the film, Mary Poppins even recites the word backwards, but that may be pushing it a bit too far for today. 

 

Over the years, I have met several people who get tongue-tied with words like ‘thief’, often pronounced ‘fith’ and ‘specific’, which is often confused with ‘Pacific’. That is without the real tongue twisters like ”She sells seashells on the seashore. The shells that she sells are seashells, I’m sure.”  

Coping through Tough Times

We are living in interesting times. The world continues in a state of recession. The season of abundance seems to have come and gone and now the season of recession seems to be entrenching itself. People are finding that times are difficult and the effects of this difficulty seem to be affecting the whole world. Economies are shrinking and jobs are being lost. As I was contemplating these issues, I began to realize that there is a story in the Bible about a similar situation that took place.