Which season is your favorite? Is it summer, with its long evenings and freedom filled days? How about fall, with its vibrant colors and comforting quiet? Or are you one that enjoys the coziness of winter? Each season has its own charm, but spring has to be my favorite for a number of reasons.

First of all, spring comes on the heels of winter, and even though Northern California does not have the long, harsh winters that many states experience, it is cold enough and wet enough (particularly this year) and long enough to make me look forward to its end.

Second, the weather, though still a bit unpredictable, is as close to perfect as it can get. The sun is out, but the temperature hovers in the seventies, not the hundreds of summer, and the air is fresh and clean from the gentle breezes and occasional spring showers.

Third, the views are spectacular. It is our season of puffy white clouds against a brilliant blue sky. The green is the most vibrant of the year, and the snow capped mountains have a very different beauty about them when one is viewing them while wearing short sleeves.

But what I enjoy most is that spring is a tangible reminder of God’s faithfulness. Dark, cold times will come to an end. Beauty does rise out of hardship. And new beginnings are a natural part of our life here on earth.

I thank God for the tangible reminders found in the seasons. Please share how you might see God in summer, fall, and winter.

One of the most popular movies of this year has to be Hidden Figures, the story of three African American women who worked for NASA in the 1960s, but who lived in obscurity until the movie brought their contributions to light. Even then, the author of the book said that every woman in the African American Human Computer Unit had a story, but she decided that she could really only focus on three, so there are twenty-seven plus women whose individual stories are still hidden.

Katherine Goble/Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson probably never dreamed that their lives would be made public and so had to be content with only them and those around them knowing the value of what they had brought to the NASA table.

Likewise, there are many people today who have made invaluable contributions to their field who continue to go unrecognized. Add to that number of people who think their contributions are nominal or not valuable at all. The truth is we don’t know, and may never know, what place our small part has played in the bigger picture.

The same could be said of our Christian life. We may never know in this lifetime if our words or actions have affected someone else. While we often see the effect that the internationally, nationally, and locally recognized figures may have, we must not underestimate the role our one on one interactions may play. In that sense we are all Hidden Figures.

But we should not be discouraged nor dismayed by that. In fact, Matthew chapter 6 reminds us that if our motive for acting righteously, giving, praying, or fasting is to be recognized by man, then we already have our reward, and it is only a temporal one.

James tells his readers to ‘humble yourselves the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up” (4:10), and Peter echoes this same advice in I Peter 5:6 but says “God will lift you up in due time.” (Emphasis mine)

The three women of Hidden Figures lived more than sixty years without the world knowing their stories, but obviously God felt that 2016 was “due time” that the world was in on the secret. May the humility, work ethic, and contentment of these three ladies and the many who worked with them be both an inspiration to us and a reminder that while the world may never know what our lives have accomplished, God does.

No one can minimize the grief that accompanies the loss of a loved one. However, there is another loss that we might have to experience more than once that can also cause deep hurt, and that is rejection.

We all want to be chosen for that job or that award or to be that friend. To be deemed not good enough or not wanted hurts. And the pain is even deeper if we are not wanted anymore because we are replaced by someone else, especially when we have invested so much of ourselves into that job or product or person. Rejection feeds into our insecurities and doubts.

What makes matters harder is that there is often little we can do to change it. The choice is not ours, but we must deal with the aftermath, pick up the pieces, and move on.

The best book I have read regarding the subject of rejection is Lysa Terkeurst’s Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely.

I won’t try to summarize what she says as each chapter and each page are full of wonderful insights, and I encourage everyone to read the book, for everyone can come away with something to help themselves or others.

But two points she makes have stayed with me in particular. The first was that rejection does not mean worthless. We must ground ourselves not in what others think of us, but in what God thinks of us. She says, “We’re all desperate to anchor our souls to something we can trust won’t change. . . . [But] things of this world all reveal what incapable anchors they really are. . . . My identity must be anchored to the truth of who God is and who He is to me. Only then can I find a stability beyond what my feelings will ever allow.”

The second point is that she believes “there is usually some element of protection wrapped in every rejection.” God  in his mercy allows rejection into our lives to protect us. Protection perhaps from a harmful, undesirable, or ungodly, situation, environment, or relationship, or perhaps something else. We may never know, but we do know that God is good, and He is merciful.

Yes, there are things we can learn about ourselves through our rejections, things we might need to work on and change. But we must never let rejection define our value. Our value was determined when God uniquely created each one of us. The God who said, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5). The same God who “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). The same Son who himself was rejected by man (Isaiah 53:3).

So if each of us truly believes, as Lysa says, that God is good; that He is good to me; and that I trust God to be God,  then she tells us (and shows us how in her book) to “Live from the abundant place that you are loved, and you won’t find yourself begging others for scraps of love.”

TerKeurst, Lysa. Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely. Nelson Books: 2016, Kindle edition.

This week I want to give a nod to music. Music had to be God’s idea, because music is an intrinsic part of nature, from the songs of birds to the calls of animals to the percussion of the wind, rain, and crashing waves. Nature itself is a grand orchestra.

But as much as I enjoy nature’s symphonies, I want to take my hat off to those men and women who create music as well as those who interpret and perform it. One cannot exist without the other.

In my opinion, music is the language of the soul. It speaks to the mind, the heart, and the body. It is logical, emotional, and physical, and because of that it moves our spirit.

As one who has taught writing for years, I know that the written word can do the same: affect us logically, emotionally, and even physically, through the hidden cadences of words and sentences. All art forms have this ability.

But music is special. It is the synthesis of words, notes, and rests. For reasons few of us can explain, it has the ability to become one with our body. How else can we explain the calm or the excitement or the heartbreak that comes with listening to a particular piece of music. How else can we explain why we are moved to dance, sing, weep, or throw our hands up in joy.  Like no other art form, we seem to be able to commune fully with music.

So thank you to all of you who write and/or perform music. The professionals and the amateurs. Yours is a wonderful calling. I cannot imagine, nor would I want to experience, a world without music.