We’ve just returned from several weeks on the road. We left our prairie home in fall’s dawn, and arrived home to find delinquent summer. People from our area have been waiting for promised summer since June. It never showed up. Now, on this Thanksgiving weekend, people are raking leaves under a blazing sun. Sweating. Tall glasses of lemonade nearby. The air (sublime change) feels dry. No puddles in the basements. There are, alas, mosquitoes, exacting their due for a lost season of bloodsucking.
On the road home we noticed combines scurrying across the fields like so many beetles. In a week there could be snow, but here in the Canadian prairies–as elsewhere–farmers literally make hay while the sun shines. It hasn’t done that nearly enough this year, they say. We all say. (Sorry, God. We know you have an absolutely perfect perspective on the relentless deluging of this area since last spring. And, on the bright side, things are awfully green around here.)
Across the ocean, European weather forecasters predict the coldest winter in a thousand years. Their Canadian counterparts say we’re in for record-breaking snows on this side of the water.
The times, they are a changin’. Astonishing advances in technology, policitical upheaval, odd alliances worldwide…doesn’t it make you wonder? For millenia, Christians have anticipated Jesus promised return. Some have prophesied dates and times, even waited in hills to be the first to see him return in the clouds–a foolish thing, in light of Jesus’ comment during his earth-days, that no one knows the time of his return–not even himself.
Nevertheless…it makes me wonder…like our long-awaited summer, could Jesus return today? And if so, if I could really know, how would I then live this day?