The Negev (Southern Israel)

You would never know it’s fall in Los Angeles. The leaves haven’t changed, the temperature is in the 100s, and I didn’t know my body could produce this much sweat.

And yet it’s officially autumn—the calendar told me so.

Sometimes the seasons of our lives are like that too. The season has shifted and things are brand new, but everything still feels like yesterday.

If your season of life has changed, or if you’ve sensed God telling you that “new things are coming,” don’t be discouraged when it feels like you’re still stuck in the past. If you hold steady, yesterday will yield to tomorrow and your season really will shift for the good.

Psalm 126:4 says, “Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev.” This prayer doesn’t really mean much to us until we learn that by late summer the river bottoms in the Negev (the desert country in Southern Israel) had become bone dry, and the thought of retrieving water from them was laughable. However, when the winter’s rainy season finally trumped summer, fresh, clean, life giving water would begin to flow once more.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that life will flow again. That’s my prayer for you and your loved ones this week—that the life-giving flow of God’s Spirit would wet and flood this current season of your life.