"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."
-Leonardo da Vinci
It is mid August, but already it smells like autumn; like dying leaves and bruised apples beginning to rot. Even for Calgary, this is premature. Premature because the air isn’t crisp and the nights are not yet cold, but still there is the scent of what is to come. The aromas of autumn are present because of what we’ve suffered, not because the time has come to change seasons. For two days last week violent thunderstorms moved over the city and what the first hailstorm didn’t kill, the second finished off. The raspberry canes, once flushed with crimson orbs and leafy with green now typify their name with barren stalks. The climbing scarlet runner beans were beaten into a sad, battered tangle. Even the apples that managed to stay on the trees are bruised and beginning to attract the wasps. It isn’t just the fruit--the harvest--that is destroyed. All the flowers not sheltered under the eaves of the house are nothing but naked stems, shorn of leaves and blooms by the violence of the storms. Even the things that are meant for beauty are broken.
It’s depressing.
I remember looking at my life a couple of years ago and feeling just like this. Every dream planted, every hope sown was mown down, battered and broken. There would be no harvest. All that remained was a wasteland and a monumental clean up job that I couldn’t bear to contemplate. Hail was the analogy I identified with the most. A pelting from the heavens that I couldn’t avoid. I related heavily and bitterly to Joel 1:4.
“What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left, other locusts have eaten.”
There is nothing to be done about a crop that is destroyed. Within minutes the time and work of a whole season is devastated. Anything with life in it takes time to grow, but destruction is the work of an instant. Time is the one resource we always feel impoverished by. Once passed, it is gone forever. But when everything is devastated and the hail storm or the locust swarm passes by, there is nothing to be done but clean up the dead pieces and wait for the next planting season. You have to wait to try again.
And, you almost can’t bear to try again because it seems that having no hope of harvest is preferable to the crushing disappointment of a harvest stolen. And I felt so mad at God about the whole thing because if anyone could have stopped my allegorical hail, it was Him. He is the last line of defense and He let the side down--or, so I begrudgingly thought.
“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten--the great locusts and the young locusts, the other locusts and the locust swarm-- my great army that I sent among you.” Joel 2:25
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Joel. Hold up a second, here. God sent the locust swarm? It was His great army? So, it wasn’t just a case of Him letting the side down because He was busy saving trapped miners or something catastrophic; He actually intentionally destroyed everything I was working toward? What kind of ally is that? Why would He do that? Weren’t the things I was working toward in line with what He wants? I certainly thought they were, but what becomes more and more abundantly clear all the time is that I don’t really understand God at all.
“There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death.”
(Proverbs 14:12 NLT)
“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the ends it leads to death.”
(Proverbs 16:25 NIV)
Seems. Appears. These are the words of deception; of slight of hand. It was so true that Solomon wrote this same statement twice two chapters apart. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten he’d already written this proverb down; repetition in the Bible usually means the author intended to add emphasis. The thing is, usually when I read that kind of verse, I think of it as applying to other people; not me, because I really am trying to do what God puts in front of me to do. Aren’t those kind of verses about people who don’t care at all about what God wants? The people who aren’t--you know--reading the Bible? Maybe. But it would be a little odd for God to fill the Scriptures that His people are to follow with instructions and cautions for the people who will never read it. I guess that means it applies to me. There was a way that seemed right, but wasn’t.
But sometimes I think we get so far into the planting season that we don’t want to know if there is a problem. We want to justify ourselves and all our time and effort because it is expensive and heartbreaking to have been so wrong.
It is God’s mercy and love that reveals the deception; even if He uses a hail storm or locusts because it might just be that He knows that if we could salvage any shred of the deception we would rather do that than turn the rudder of our lives against the current. We would rather not believe that we’ve been deceived for so long.
“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten--the great locusts and the young locusts, the other locusts and the locust swarm-- my great army that I sent among you.”
There is promise in the face of disaster. God is faithful and even though He destroyed the harvest, He promises abundance. He promises the restoration of lost time. Lost effort. Even though I was the one that was deceived, He--in His goodness and mercy-- more than makes up for the loss. It is the kindness of God who sends a pelting from heaven to save your life.
