September
Harvest Season
Psalm 65
Praise awaits you, our God, in Zion;
to you our vows will be fulfilled.
You who answer prayer,
to you all people will come.
When we were overwhelmed by sins,
you forgave our transgressions.
Blessed are those you choose
and bring near to live in your courts!
We are filled with the good things of your house,
of your holy temple.
You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds,
God our Savior,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
and of the farthest seas,
who formed the mountains by your power,
having armed yourself with strength,
who stilled the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of their waves,
and the turmoil of the nations.
The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;
where morning dawns, where evening fades,
you call forth songs of joy.
You care for the land and water it;
you enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water
to provide the people with grain,
for so you have ordained it.
You drench its furrows and level its ridges;
you soften it with showers and bless its crops.
You crown the year with your bounty,
and your carts overflow with abundance.
The grasslands of the wilderness overflow;
the hills are clothed with gladness.
The meadows are covered with flocks
and the valleys are mantled with grain;
they shout for joy and sing.
Hiya friends!
Growing up, I was never a big September girl. As August would draw to a close each summer, three words echoed hauntingly in T.V. commercials and Walmart aisles: “back-to-school”. This was devastating to me. I wanted to soak in every drop of summer, and reminders about school just absolutely ruined the vibe.
Now, I kind of love Septembers. There is something exciting about the air cooling down, the whispered promise of fall in the early morning breeze. This line from the movie, You’ve Got Mail, is somehow the perfect characterization of September for me: “Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” September rolls around, and suddenly I want to sharpen all the pencils in my life: I want to make my bed with the windows open, letting in crisp autumn air, I want to iron my clothes, to sweep the beach sand out of all the corners of the room.
With September comes school, and a new school year brings new settings, opportunities, and friends. Beginning something provides so much perspective, provides a chance to approach things in a new way, to start over, to reinvent oneself. September is a month that feels like New Year, a moment for resolution. In fact, in Orthodox Christianity, September 1st is known as “the Day of Creation”, and is the first day of the liturgical year. It’s a day to commemorate God’s creative work on the first day in all history, the day he created the cosmos.
If September is a month to celebrate Creator God, my semester abroad has made it really easy to do. On September 10th, I flew with 36 students and another faculty member to Sydney, Australia, where we met our director, Pam, to begin three months of exploring Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. Sydney is an awesome city that is lush with natural wonder. It is the kind of city I could enjoy living in because at any given moment my eyes can find trees and birds and living things. There are ibises casually hanging around in the trash cans, and cockatoos, and possums that are weirdly cute, and beaches, and parks, and hiking trails. I’ve loved listening to one of our girls, Ellie Howell, talk about how she’s found so much joy noticing that the cities we’ve visited in Australia have been intentionally designed to incorporate natural beauty and benefit into the structure of the city itself. It really inspires me, too.
Also in Sydney is a somewhat famous opera house. The construction is a masterful work, which applies design and engineering in the most beautifully impressive way, clearly demonstrating God’s creative spirit at work in humanity. It is humbling to look at, to think of the minds that came together to produce something so beautiful, and functional, and iconic. Then, within the walls of the opera house are exceptional musical performances. Our group attended a performance by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and while they performed, I thought about the countless hours each individual in that orchestra had spent throughout their lives practicing their instrument, so that they might come together to produce a work which was written years ago by another extraordinarily creative human — all so that beauty could exist in the ears of the listeners in that auditorium. Creator God, at it again, this time through the gifts he bestows on his people.
My favorite part of our trip so far, and the days that I most keenly felt joy in celebrating God as Creator, were when we stayed the night on a boat in the Great Barrier Reef. Some of the students spent the days SCUBA diving, and most of us snorkeled. My friends, there are some CRAZY fish out there. Like, you’ll be looking at the water, and it’s pretty, and blue, and reflective. Then you stick your goggled face below, and suddenly you see an entire universe under there, with coral, and anemones, and eels and sea turtles and blue starfish and sharks and baby clownfish and enormous parrotfish and MORE. We had just, so, so much fun. I will never get over it. How sobering to think that God created all that beauty and diversity, the water teeming with life which intersects and communicates and balances the health of the entire ocean, out of the goodness of his loving heart. And there it remains, under the surface, hidden from view. So moving, so beautiful.
No matter where you are, September is a great month to celebrate God’s creation, and a major way many people can do that this time of year is through harvest. Good things have grown all summer, and now is the time to gather them up, to express gratitude for the growth that took place, to store it all up for tomorrow when it’s cold and dry and summer feels like a long time ago. I love the book Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. In it, the main character’s family spends the summer collecting dandelions with which to make wine. In the coldest winter nights, the boy sneaks down to the cellar to open up a bottle, letting the scent and flavor transport him to warmer days. He describes it like this: “Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.”
September is the month to gather the dandelions. The new school year brings new challenges, and the coming colder months bring difficulties too. If the one who delights in the law of the Lord is like a tree which yields its fruit in its season (Psalm 1:1-3), maybe there are seasons where we need to harvest that fruit and save it for a chilly day. Maybe in our hearts, there’s a cellar where we can store jars of love, joy, and peace, cans of patience, kindness, and goodness, salted and dried faithfulness, and self-control wrapped tightly in parchment paper.
Some of my students have really impressed me with what they’ve stored up for themselves from what God has grown in them throughout their lives, what they’ve harvested in their minds and souls that they are bringing into this semester. Studying abroad is both extraordinarily fun, but also incredibly challenging. If one does not enter their semester abroad with intentionality and gratitude, the time can slip by in a series of uncomfortable, impatient days. Students who arrive to their abroad semester with positive attitudes, open mindsets, and humble heart postures are much more likely to extract the most meaning, enjoyment, and growth from their travels.
First, I’ll tell you about Lizzy. When I arrived to the Atlanta airport and met some of the students I would be traveling with, we started to discuss the intimidating and adventurous opportunities we had coming up. Mostly, skydiving. (Yikes). Lizzy said something so true and wise. “I know I’m going to be afraid, but I’m going to have courage and I’m going to do it anyway. That’s what I keep thinking about as a theme for this whole semester — we will have so much opportunity to be courageous, which doesn’t mean we won’t be afraid. It just means we will try to do scary things even though we are afraid.” I’ve already seen a lot of courage in Lizzy. She’s a gentle and quiet spirit who chooses to be outgoing and kind by branching out in new friendships despite fear of not fitting in. She has put herself in new and uncomfortable settings and responded graciously. She has snorkeled with a sting ray! She rode a sand toboggan down a terrifyingly steep slope! She did it afraid, because she is so awesome and courageous.
Another student who I’ve seen approach the semester with intentionality is Chase. When I asked him what his theme for the semester is, he started goofily singing, “Have you seen Jesus my Lord?” which kind of made me laugh. But then he was serious, and explained that this summer was the first time he heard that song, when it was sung a lot at the camp he worked at. The chorus of the song is this:
Have you seen Jesus my Lord?
He’s here in plain view
Take a look, open your eyes
He’ll show it to you
Chase told me that the song has inspired him to look for Jesus every day, in everything, and that he believes that we can, and do, encounter God in all things, if we pray for the eyes to see it. One of the ways that Chase sees Jesus daily is through the people around him, who are vessels of the Spirit. I think Chase’s perspective in this is awesome, and it gives him eyes to better love and appreciate his classmates and the locals around him, which is a blessing to the whole group.
One of our first days in Sydney, I went on a hike with a group of the girls. Our conversation question on the bus ride to the path was, “Who is your celebrity crush?” Our conversation question on the ferry ride back home was, “What are your thoughts about Judas?” The second question came from my girlie Ellie Scott. As you can imagine, the entire hike was lush with interesting conversation.
At one point when we were taking a break, Ellie told me that her goal for the semester was to delight in the Lord, and that she chose to view delight as a spiritual discipline. Christians can sometimes focus so heavily on the disciplines that are structured, and which feel more sacrificial. Ellie said she had realized that delighting is a discipline too, and that if she didn’t approach delight in this way, she may miss the opportunity to see how good and beautiful God is. I love thinking about delight like this. Instead of looking at her phone while on the bus, Ellie has been looking out the window and taking in the countryside. Instead of looking to distract, and pass through, and consume, Ellie is looking to notice, and enjoy, and chew.
My personal theme for the semester — the idea that I’m harvesting up for future use — is abundance. Every semester in chapel, I tell the story about how I came to live and work for Harding International Programs. I have a long history of anxiety in uncertainty. If I ever had a crisis in life, it was around the time I had to make a decision. Graduating high school? Crisis. Graduating college? Crisis. I hated feeling like my next step would affect the rest of my future. What if I chose the wrong major? What if I moved to the wrong place? What if God’s plan for my life is a narrow pathway, and I take the wrong turn and miss it? The weight of my own future being in my own hands was too heavy and I was not confident in myself to get there. Really, I didn’t know that I could trust God with my future. I prayed anyway, and, like Lizzy, I tried to have the courage to live life despite the fear — to live it afraid.
At each turn, God showed himself to be trustworthy. Some periods of life have been more challenging, or lonely, or difficult, and others have been lighter, and simpler, and more joyful. Like Chase, I tried to have open eyes to see Jesus in the good and in the bad. In all of it, I have seen, over and over, that worrying and fearing the uncertainty does not produce anything, and that God works and moves through all kinds of seasons of life.
I could never, ever, have planned a life route that would have led me to do the work I have gotten to do these last three years. It never would have even occurred to dream up this job, to hope for it, to work toward it, to worry about whether I wouldn’t get it. The university I attended, the degrees I pursued, the work experience I had, none of it had anything to do with Harding IP. One day, my friend Courtney and I decided to travel to Greece for a month to see what it would feel like to live there. When I got home, my mom saw that Harding had posted the assistant position. As I read the job description, I realized that even though none of my choices in life had had anything to do with this job, I had so many experiences and had developed so many skills that would help me to do well in it. It felt like God had been preparing me all along to get to come on this adventure. Long story short, I applied, and I got the job. Bada-bing bada-boom.
This is my last abroad semester, and TBH, I don’t have a plan for what’s next. In the past, I was taught, over and over, that God is a good father, who provides good gifts to his children, who loves me. I’m harvesting that gift, that trust that he is good, and I am believing that he will provide and is providing abundantly. Like Ellie, I’m learning to not worry away the present for fear of the future, but to delight in it for the beauty that God is working right in front of me, the beauty in his creation, his people, and his abundant power and goodness.
Ephesians 3:20-21
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
Love ya!
Lacey
September is the month to gather dandelions paragraph was 👌 chefs kiss.
I always learn from your posts about your adventures. What an opportunity to be in Australia! Love you!