Dear Editor,
After Rebecca left the parsonage, I went to our home library with a cup of green tea to think about our meeting. I also took one of my homemade oatmeal cookies to eat. I never knew if I helped her or not until I heard from her after our meeting. Perhaps we will have a few words at our Sunday service.
Rebecca is a 29-year-old married woman. She and her husband have been desperately trying to have a baby for a few years with no success. I had never focused so diligently on a woman’s unfulfilled desire to have a child until I began trying to help her. The whole mystery of the reproductive system came into my focus. When my husband Willie and I were planning a family, it was all very natural and easy. We had our two children without giving it much technical thought. But now with Rebecca I am even reading books on fertility.
A woman is fertile only six days a month. The five days before ovulation and the day itself. There is a definite season for the creation of life and Rebecca and her husband Adam know the life cycle well and have been practicing it. The life cycle is about every twenty-eight days.
This loving couple have been experiencing profound faith and hope on a monthly basis. They have faith in biology and they hope that their humanity will produce a child for them to love and raise. When both virtues fail my task is to help them answer the question why.
To gain a different perspective I stood up and looked out the window. Our parsonage sits on top of a hill overlooking a half-acre pond which is about three acres down a steep hill below the house. There they were again. Every year in spring a couple of geese return to our pond to mate and to raise their goslings. There they were standing on our side of the pond facing each other. They were motionless. I wondered what was going on in their minds and hearts as they stood there gazing at each other. And then I realized that they were experiencing a season as well. The same clock that measures Rebecca and Adam’s season was ticking for the geese, but they had a different season. An annual one.
I sat down with my philosophical thoughts. I began thinking of all the seasons that we experience. The four seasons that we weather in Pennsylvania. The seasons of good health and bad health. The seasons of being in and out of love. The season of having faith and hope and then the disappointment of having faith and hope fail us. And the ultimate seasons of life and death.
And then my mind began to question how we deal with the seasons in our lives. My thought was that our character is the bridge which carries us from season to season. Our personality has a foundation which is our character. Dealing with disappointments both big and small may be the key to the development of character. And it is our character which gives strength. Not receiving the gift we wanted. Not receiving the recognition which we thought we deserved. The imagined or wished for things that never happened give us the opportunity to grow. Maybe that’s why we are born little so that we can learn from disappointments. Being born small gives us the time to develop character to weather the storms after a disappointment.
And then I thought about myself. I don’t have one season in my life but I have many. I have those of my family and I also have those of my congregants. As the Senior Pastor of The First Church of God’s Love in the bucolic farming village of Halo, Pennsylvania I am intimately involved with my parishioners’ lives. Their disappointments, their losses, their illnesses, and yes their deaths are mine. My ministry has taught me that character sustains us between the seasons that affect our lives.
Amen.
The Reverend Mrs. Silence DoGood
Senior Pastor
Executive Director
President
Chairman
Choir Master (part-time)
The First Church of God’s Love
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