Nobody Asked For The Seasons

Deke has been leaning on that gate for about forty years and he has asked for a great deal over that fence.

Rain in 1994 and again in 2003. Dry in the September of 2011, badly, for eleven days, and he can tell you what he said and where he was standing.

He is not embarrassed about any of that. He would say that a man who works ground and does not talk to God about weather is either extremely relaxed or not paying attention.

What happened last April was that his neighbor Curtis, who is about thirty and came to farming late and asks the questions a person asks when they came to a thing late, was leaning on the same gate.

And Curtis said, looking at a field that was doing what a field does in April: "Does it ever get to you that we only ever ask for the variations?"

Deke said what.

And Curtis said: "The rain. The dry. The frost coming early. That is the weather round the edges. Nobody ever asks for spring. Spring is just there."

Deke has been thinking about that for eighteen months.

Because he added it up, and the arithmetic is this. In forty years of leaning on that gate he has asked, seriously and specifically, about a hundred and fifty times. Every one of those requests was about a variation. A bit more of something, or a bit less, or two weeks of the right thing at the right moment.

And underneath every single one of those requests, running the whole time, unmentioned, unrequested and completely unremarked, was the arrangement itself. The fact that there is a spring at all. That the ground comes back. That there is a sequence and it repeats.

He said, to Curtis, over the gate: "I have spent forty years asking Him to adjust something I never once thanked Him for setting up."

You may do the same, and it is not a fault, it is what a person does. We ask about the variations, because the variations are what hurt, and the arrangement underneath goes unmentioned because it has never failed. And nobody has ever pointed out to you when that arrangement was promised, and to whom, and what they had asked for.

The Promise Was Made To Nobody Who Asked

There is a sentence at the end of the flood account, said by God, and the striking thing about it is the silence that precedes it.

Nobody requests this. There is no petition in the text. Noah has just come out of a boat into a wrecked world, and he does not ask for a guarantee about agriculture, and he would have had no reason to expect one.

"While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."Genesis 8:22

Six pairs and a promise that they do not stop.

It is spoken into a situation where the person on the receiving end has asked for nothing, is in no position to negotiate, and has just watched the worst thing in the book happen.

You are living inside a promise that nobody applied for. Genesis 8 issues the arrangement unrequested and unnegotiated, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and leans it on a field gate in April.

And notice what the promise is about. Not prosperity, not comfort, not the absence of hard years. Deke has had hard years and so has everybody who has ever worked ground. It is about the sequence continuing. Seedtime and harvest. Cold and heat. The thing that keeps going underneath the variations that people actually pray about.

You have been standing on an unrequested arrangement your whole working life. That is what the written word says about the ground under everybody's feet, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a promise nobody asked for land in a man who has asked about a hundred and fifty times.

Nothing Is Being Asked Of You In Return

Now say it plainly, because this is the landing category and how these pages end is the guarantee this whole site runs on.

Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no schedule, no habit, no commitment, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

There is no response required and there is no arrangement waiting further down that turns spring into an invoice. You will not finish this page owing anybody anything.

That matters here more than anywhere, because a page about a free arrangement that ends in a request would prove itself wrong in its last paragraph.

You have not been put under any obligation by any of this. It is written that He makes His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, which describes a supply that is not calibrated to anybody's account, and His Spirit is the one who has been at that gate through all forty years.

And you are as fully His in a bad year as a good one, because the promise in Genesis 8 is about the sequence continuing and not about the yield, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from attaching a condition to a season.