New Seasons
Dr. Timothy Byler
April 13, 2022
CLEAR!!!
Hit it again. CLEAR!!!
It has been six years since there was even a trace of life in this blog. Life changed. It moved on and the seeming effectiveness of my efforts here had waned. Or perhaps I convinced myself of that in a fervor of ADHD boredom and simply licensed myself to move on to something new.
Much has happened in that six year window. Children married. The church we pastored went through a tremendous growth spurt. We purchased a facility to house our training center.
And… I got hit by lightning!
A lot of things happen when you experience a lightning strike. One would think that one’s life would flash in front of their eyes. Mine did not. One second, I was standing in the backyard in the rain, wearing nothing but a worn out pair of running shorts and earnestly coaxing my dog to respond to the call of nature. The next second, there was a CRACK! and a sound like someone was crinkling the sort of cellophane wrapper one finds enveloping a gift basket of fruit.
My next conscious moment was me, laying on the ground in a puddle of water with my dog pawing at my shoulder in an attempt to awaken me. I believe that I am safe in saying that I am the only person who’s dog “laid hands” on him and was brought back to consciousness!
That lightning strike was not the beginning of a turn for me. Rather, it was just another shot in a war declared by an enemy intent on stopping what was already birthing in me. In the months surrounding that night, we suffered some major personal losses, revamped our ministry, navigated our way through a very complex multi million dollar purchase, and did so while being thrust headlong into a world wide pandemic.
My last blog was July 4, 2016. In August of that year, I drew a line in the sand. I made a personal decision that something had to change - completely… totally…
I told God exactly that. It has been said,
“If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.”
I am not certain He was laughing. More likely He was saying, “Well… now it begins.”
If things didn’t change, I wasn’t going to make it. In that year, it felt that everything I valued came under fire. Scripture talks about “that which can be shaken will be shaken”. It is easy to preach. It is not so easy to live through. We had been displaced from our home during that time, due to a flood caused by a failure of a fifteen dollar valve in a toilet. The week that the restoration of our home was complete, Hurricane Matthew unleashed on our South Georgia community and brought with it a tornado that picked up five of our neighbors pine trees and dropped them on our house. We recovered. We got through it. We found the daylight. And I got hit by lightning!
Not all trouble is trouble. That is a phrase offered to me by my dearest brother, Dana Gammill. It is a phrase that was frequently uttered by his legendary father, Herchell. It is the phrase that got me through. It turns out, there is more than one way to renovate a home! When we purchased this one, we loved the space. We loved the property. We DID NOT love the house. To say that it was dated was an understatement. The inside was circa 1975 with a few walls adorned with some less than interesting 1980’s era wallpaper. And… it did not have a porch.
One flood and one tornado later - and $170,000 in restoration repairs - and the home is finally… home. The renovations we never could have afforded were afforded for us - all brought on by the calamity of trouble. And, I was learning a lesson. Like Paul, when faced with a shipwreck, you can consider what it means to drown, or you can hold onto the knowledge that God actually WILL complete what He begins in you. You just have to wash up on the correct island!
All of this seemingly random musing actually has a point. If I had known on the front end what I and my family were going to face as we embraced the call to move forward, I don’t know that I would have been so eager to take the step. It is easy to talk about faith that moves mountains. It is less so when you are standing there as the mountain looms over you with a foreboding shadow. Yet, we are not called to live in the shadows. We are called to shine light into the darkness.
For some of you reading this, your last season has been a shadow season. Most of us have suffered tremendous losses. Family and friends who succumbed to a dreaded virus, positions of employment shifted or eliminated, business owners finding themselves at a loss to even find employees, the list goes on.
Psalm 30:5 teaches us that “weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.”
The rest of what David wrote is not simply a testimony of how God will pull you through. It is also a testimony
of how David chose to respond to the knowledge that God DOES pull us through.
Today, with this post, I activated the defibrillator. It is time, not only to hear my heartbeat, but to listen to how closely it’s rhythm aligns with the heartbeat of the Master! Sometimes the night can last six years but look up! The Sun is on the horizon!
Dr. T
