The Appointed Time by Shonda Parker | HOMESCHOOLING TODAY Magazine

Our lives are seasonal—childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and the aged years, with each season having its peculiarities. Respect for the work of each season is important. As mothers, not only do we need to respect the season we are living through but we also have the privilege and responsibility of overseeing the proper seasonal work of our children.

Spring

During the spring of childhood, we must work the ground and plant the seeds, watching for those first tender green shoots bursting forth with promise. The newness of creation lies before us in this season. Information input is constant and is the primary work for the spring of our children’s lives. They are willing to try this way and that just to know they can do it. Me want to do it! Their desire to figure out how to do things seems limitless. Providing the foundation for living and faith is a parent’s all-important work in this season to ensure that deep root systems develop in our children. In the garden, we find that plants thrive in environments of consistent care of watering, feeding, and weeding; so our children need consistency of care in nurturing, teaching, and guarding.

A day does not pass when we do not have work to do, repeating the same work day after day. This season can be particularly tiring and a time for growth in patience for us. We cannot yet see the full reward of our daily work. Take encouragement from each blessing that comes from your daily faithfulness when you see the tilled ground begin to part, the tiny plant begin to rise up, the unfurling of the sprout, the tender shoot, the first putting on of leaves, and the upward thrust toward maturity.

A seedling cannot yield fruit, but the mature plant will produce if we trust in God and obey His commands to keep our homes and love our husbands and children. Creation must be stewarded; our homes and family are part of creation and need daily tending. The hope of seeing a mature plant ready to put on summer’s fruit requires recognition of this valuable fruit—our children—being produced in our own summer season.

Summer

Though spring seems busy, early summer intensifies as our seedlings grow tall and strong, preparing to flower. Under such rapid growth, our children need intensive training to yield a mature plant capable of producing good fruit. Spring years, focused on training and instruction, turn to summer years of granting increasing freedom to our children as we watch them grow, while we continue to instruct and intensively train on the right path.

Like plants, young adult children want to go their own way. Our work as parents and home garden stewards is to use the early summer years to keep watch over where our plants are heading in their growth, to train them in trusting and obeying God and to teach them confession and repentance as they find ways of waywardness. By example, we continue daily to steer them back to the path when their growth strays. There are various methods of training a plant for maturity and abundant fruit production. We do not need to worry over someone else’s method; we simply need to remain faithful in our own, as we daily seek to glorify God with our child-rearing.

Pruning. One often-overlooked aspect of tending our home garden is this: a plant forms healthy branches that must be removed in order for its fruit to be the best it can be. When a plant begins to bloom, the promising buds must be thinned out for the crop yield to be the healthiest and most bountiful. Some of us may have allowed some of our plants to grow without this pruning and seen the low yield that results. We cannot do it all; we cannot provide every educational opportunity available to our children. Nor will every promising branch bear fruit. There will be branches—opportunities—removed, and this is not only okay; it is healthy and right. We can trust in the providence of God to direct our children’s fruitfulness as He directs us to prune in certain areas.

As my daughter and I were watching a ballet-dancing movie recently, I asked her, “Do you regret that we decided to stop taking classes?” After her honest yes, she followed with, “But, I could not have danced forever nor would it allow me to serve the way piano has allowed me to serve.” Her ballet bloom had been removed. We allowed the piano bloom to stay and nourished it until it has produced delightful fruit.

A Mother’s Summer

Since our good Father grants a long summer in our lives, we mothers often find ourselves in the same life season as our young adult children. This may be a hardship because summer is a time of fruitful production, and women in particular often struggle with the many ways in which we may be productive and fruitful as we strive to look well to the ways of our household” (Proverbs 31:27a).

Because a woman can do a great many things, we sometimes think we must do these things if we are able. Again, branches—even those that would produce—must be pruned for maximum fruitfulness to occur. When we begin bearing children—a fruitfulness of great and generation-upon-generation, lasting heritage—we will have to prune back some of our fruitfulness in other areas of our lives, both in ministry and industry.

An unkempt plant which has not been pruned or had its buds thinned out will have its energy divided and spread thin, producing inferior fruit throughout its branches. Likewise, a mother’s energy is diverted when she attempts to “do it all,” all at the same time. Perhaps we can do many things; but we must exercise the patience to do them in the appointed season. The blessing of children appoints us to tend to their growing times of spring and early summer.

During our children’s time of spring and early to mid-summer—before they begin to produce a full bounty of their own fruit—we have the blessed opportunity to use their training time as time to increase our own training as well in preparation for when they reach full maturity and we then have seasonal time for bearing fruit in other areas.

We rightfully read in Proverbs 31 of a virtuous woman of great productivity in family and commercial industry. Opinions may vary, but one thing is clear: this woman looks well to the ways of her household. She is not given to the laziness of working on other things when there are commitments that need attending. Though “she opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy,” she does not neglect her own household in order to do so.

A plant nourished properly and trained and pruned with great care is capable of yielding a great deal of fruit, fruit which may be shared with others. The mother who has been well-loved and cared for by her parents and who is well-loved and cared for by her husband can yield an astonishing amount of fruit, both in faithful, repentant children and industry.

The Proverbs 31 woman is a woman with some years and experience on her. She has spent some years training to have an eye for a good field. She has spent years training to know how to plant a vineyard and expect profit from it. She has spent years in training to make fine linen to sell in the marketplace. She has learned to respect her husband so that he may trust in her. Her husband is known in the gates. The new or young man in town does not achieve this distinction; to be known by the elders takes time.

This woman, our role model, has spent her summer years wisely—in training. She may very well have engaged in some of these activities in small ways during her early and mid-summer years, but it is apparent she is in the fullness of late summer and early fall when we see her fruitfulness extolled in extending beyond the needs of learning to respect her husband and love her children, to be self-controlled, pure, keeping at home, kind, and submissive to her own husband.

Fall

Fall is so brilliantly lovely in this way. In its early days, the abundant fruitfulness of harvesting all that has been sown, nourished, and trained can be seen and enjoyed by more than just one household. Adult children are now producing their own fruit, enjoyed as the legacy fruit of the parents. Mothers now find they are able to pursue interests only dabbled in when their children were growing.

My eldest daughter has expressed interest in midwifery—not a surprise given the household in which she has grown up. We have encouraged her study and will provide opportunity for her to receive some of her training. We have encouraged her to enjoy this learning, but to keep her focus on preparing for the gentleman who we have every hope will come calling, child rearing, and creating a home life in which any man would find no lack of gain. Since not being married and bearing children is the exception rather than the normative rule, she has happily set her priorities on home and family, recognizing that midwifery is a fruitfulness the Lord may allow her to bear in a late summer or early fall season.

Fall and winter, in God’s economy, do not relate to barrenness and death as seen with Greek myths. Rather fall becomes a time for seeing and bringing in the harvest of our life’s labors and sharing our harvest with others. Just as our children’s interests and endeavors require pruning, God, in His goodness to us as mothers, springs forth branches of interests throughout our summer season, and He prunes where needed to give us direction for fall and winter. An early interest in herbal medicine, midwifery, or other arts and sciences, nurtured with readings, home practice, and periodic hands-on practice opportunities helping other families during summertime, can easily turn into a way of keeping one’s hand extended out to those in need of good and loving service.

In some ways, we appear to have things a bit backward in our society where women are concerned. We send forth our young women to careers with thoughts of marriage and babies coming later, after “they’ve had their opportunity.” In the meantime, God still makes a woman most fertile in her late teens and twenties, continues to protect her from disease by early childbearing and breastfeeding, and grants her maximum energy to handle those young blessings during those years. And still grants wisdom—marvelous tools for business endeavors—to those with years and life experience behind them.

One woman friend of mine took just a few piano students on throughout her daughters’ growing and education years. When her daughters began their own music study at a local university, this mother was able to take on more students, became administratively active in the regional musician’s society, orchestrates the area Youth Orchestra, and served this past year as the President of the state Music Teacher’s Association. Her daughters are now joyfully married and settled in their own homes, with a few students of their own as they await the blessing of children. Her husband is happy to see his wife blossom in her areas of gifts and talents. Here is a woman who is enjoying Fall to its fullest harvest and is able to Winter well.

Winter

Instead of the “wither and die” mentality of winter, winter instead becomes a time of dispensing wisdom that amends the soil for the new seeds that will be sown in the spring of our children and our children’s children’s lives. When our ability to work in areas of our own enjoyment begins to physically come to an end, we have winter to comfort us with hope as we make this time an investment in our legacy’s areas of enjoyment, helping them succeed, dispensing with our pearls of wisdom in teaching the younger women how to love their husbands and their children and how to keep their homes happy and holy.

Physically-demanding work may come to a close, changing to more of an emotionally and mentally active teaching, mentoring role. Once again, God in His infinite wisdom grants us blessing in this season as the very act of teaching and training helps keep our minds sharp to avoid the diminishing mental acuity generally associated with aging when we follow society’s pattern of standard retirement to putter about, trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. God gave a directive for this season, He makes it plain for women, and He grants us blessing for obedience to Him. What more might we ask?

With the distinct responsibility to teach the younger women, we must look for opportunities to serve in our congregations and community, to be available to young women who come to our doors, to open our homes in hospitality to the young and not-so-wise as well as those with whom we share the greatest of like-mindedness, to continue to lead by example as helpers of our husbands as they now, Lord willing, sit in the gates.

 

Yes, to everything there is a season, an appointed time. We find our greatest fruitfulness in attending to the work of each season, not rushing but trusting in His plan.