Summer is finally giving up the ghost here in North Texas.
Like most years, she is letting go in fits and starts – a cool morning here, a brief shower there – but the loosening of her white-hot grip of ferocity is unmistakable and oh-so-welcome.
State Fair Weather
Mark calls this in-between-season “State Fair weather.” The festive sound of that nomenclature perfectly captures the heady combination of dazzling blue skies, cool nights and warm days, and trees and flowers enjoying one last “hurrah” before the laws of deciduousness kick in.
Just outside our bedroom window, the turk’s cap has reached its apotheosis of growth. This amazing perennial dies back to the ground every winter and emerges every spring as a tender, dainty little green thing. By October, it is as large as a small car, covered in pink bells, a ridiculously huge, gaudy behemoth in our teensy back garden. Last week I watched, mesmerized, as a black and yellow swallowtail butterfly the size of my hand danced among the foliage, sipping nectar and preening in the sun.
State Fair weather beckons heat-weary people back outside, and coaxes vigor into plants that have been parched and panting since late June. State Fair weather delivers respite… a rare (and therefore precious) sequence of days when the climate is mild. State Fair weather is my favorite.
Here’s the thing I’m noticing with special interest this year: no fixed date marks the start of State Fair weather, and it may linger longer – or shorter – once it arrives. No guarantees.
State Fair weather brings me both a reminder of the graciousness with which God gives us rest from relentlessness, and of the complete unpredictability of the timing and duration of that rest.
Will God bring us relief? Always.
When will it come? You never know.
The Rainy Season
I remember when we were counting down the days to go fetch our JoJo from Ethiopia, and we were notified that paperwork was paused because “the rainy season had started.”
Like any sensible person, I wanted to know when we would get back on track, back to the timeline I had in mind and on the calendar, back to the plan of my baby girl being home for Christmas.
“Okay. So, when will the rainy season be over?” My impatience on the phone with our adoption agency rep was barely disguised.
“Um…” she paused a moment. “When it stops raining.”
The rainy season went on a while that year. We didn’t get to bring JoJo home until January. And every jaw-clenched, weepy-eyed, empty-crib day that I had to wait in the meantime lasted much longer than 24 hours. My distraught resentment – at the rain, and at God for allowing the rain – was epic.
That lesson in my own helplessness in the face of seasons was at its most profound when my baby was on the other side of the world.
But I am in the midst of an intensive review right now.
It may be State Fair weather at long last, but this cancer journey keeps getting prolonged… gobbling up months preemptively.
Just as I had a plan for the whole family to be present for Christmas of 2009, I had a plan for Christmas of 2022: that I would be completely done with cancer and treatment, completely “back to normal.”
Once again, I am not going to get my way.
Calm… and Community
I am grateful to God that there is less jaw-clenching this time around, less outrage and drama.
Having weathered numerous “rainy seasons” – and insufferable summers – in the years since that first big tutorial in my own helplessness, I know that God is going to walk me through this… no matter how long it takes… no matter how much I hate the process.
I also know that I am not the only one walking through a season I didn’t choose, a season I wish would end as abruptly as it began. That helps more than I would have dreamed possible.
When I was scope-locked on my faraway baby, the self-centeredness of my suffering amplified the pain. God has used the intervening years to graft me into a Christian community that doesn’t just support me in my trial but gives me the opportunity to support others in theirs…
Helping someone else get through a tough moment dissipates the burden of my helplessness.
Listening to someone else voice their doubts and disappointments mitigates my own.
Knowing that my hurts don’t exclude me from companionship – that I am surrounded by saints who are scarred, suffering, seeking respite just like me – this provides comfort I couldn’t have imagined.
But it’s still not my favorite.
Why waiting?
Why does God allow so many seasons of enduring into our lives?
Waiting for the heat to subside – waiting for the cancer to be cured – waiting for the baby to be home – seasons of such waiting punctuate every human life.
And I have yet to meet a human for whom “waiting” feels like State Fair weather.
Waiting means helplessness – inescapable, omnipresent.
Waiting means uncertainty – both in the now, and in the longed-for but not-guaranteed outcome.
Waiting means vulnerability – all pretense of power over circumstances stripped away, all delusions of being able to manipulate results obliterated.
But waiting also means a clear, even crystalline, view of reality…
Reality
That we are not in control, but that God is sovereign.
That we do not know what’s going to happen, but we do know Jesus has won the ultimate victory.
That we are frail, fragile, fickle creatures wholly incapable of looking after ourselves, but that we have an Abba Whose power, permanence, and faithfulness are sufficient to carry and keep us nonetheless.
These truths remain constant – State Fair weather or rainy season – and these truths offer us shade from the heat or shelter from the downpour, as we wait.
Paul, on reality
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38 – 39
The poetic familiarity of these lofty words from the apostle Paul can impede our understanding of them.
Let’s recall accurately: Paul wrote not from a bright morning of State Fair weather.
Paul wrote from a prison cell – from a rainy season that included physical torture, isolation, and illness.
Because of these contextual realities, his hymn to God’s faithfulness in Jesus Christ points us beyond seasons – to eternity.
And in eternity, time functions differently.
The constant truths of God’s sovereignty, victory, and faithfulness literally wash away the sufferings of our waiting seasons.
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
Revelation 21:3 – 4
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’
So, I pray that you are presently enjoying a personal season of State Fair weather.
But even if you are gutting out a rainy season whose cruelty and injustice gives you lockjaw, remember: not only will this, too, pass… but this, too, will someday be absorbed into the beauty and wholeness which is Heaven.
And in the meantime, you are not alone. God is with us in the waiting.
God is with us in the waiting.
