Just a Thought: The Long Season

I have spent a good part of the last two weeks consulting with clients that are transitioning, selling, or merging their businesses. One of them said to me, It has been a long season." I asked him what he meant by that, and he told me that there are seasons of life and his business has been a long one, but now he is ready to start a new season. It got me thinking about the long season.

Eight years ago, we built a new house. To be honest it was a lot of fun to build it. We found a piece of land in an area that was just getting developed on the edge of town. After a hard day at work, it was fun to stop by the project and see what had happened and see the progress. We spent a lot of time looking at plans, deciding on the right site, elevation, angles and views. We spent time reviewing the floor plan, using any extra space and creating additional space occasionally. There also was a lot of time spent selecting materials, making adjustments and choosing colors. We placed Scripture verses in every room in the house underneath floors, behind walls, etc. After the building was complete, it was almost anticlimactic to move in.

The bottom line is that we spent a lot of time dreaming of and building a house that we might live in for twenty to twenty-five years. At about the same time, I sat down with a long-time client.

He had spent a lifetime building a business. It was a very successful business. And a New York Stock Exchange company had just bought him out. I assisted with the transaction. But he had not said why he decided to sell at this point in his life. I later found out that he had cancer. I wondered at the time why he wanted to sell the business when it was a leading distributor of industrial equipment across the U.S., but now I knew.

I also had a discussion with another client named Tom. He had just had a meeting with his attorney and there seemed to him to be a thousand decisions to be made on how to address his estate taxes, income taxes, and how much he should leave to his family. And as I sat in on the meetings, I noticed that there was very little discussion on how he might give more to his church. After an uncomfortable pause I asked him the question, "Tom, what are you doing to prepare for the long season?"

We spend so much time and effort scurrying around, fretting, and spending so much energy building a house or a business that we will only occupy for a short period of time. I wonder if God is thinking, "What are you doing to prepare for the long season, when you see me?"

And what do we tell our children and grandchildren about this? In our present culture we tend to look at our lives through the lens of individualism. It is about my life, my career, my family, my time and my achievements. It focuses on my life at the one act play, debuting for an audience of one: myself. For some people, even the concept of marriage and family are about the happiness and satisfaction they bring them individually.

But there is a different lens to look at life through. When God spoke to Abraham about His covenant He said "everlasting". This is not a term that we use very much today.

The concept of an everlasting covenant with God sounds beyond belief. But that is not where it stopped with Abraham. The everlasting covenant was between Abraham and his descendants AND the generations to come. God wanted Abraham to look beyond himself and his children. He wanted him to use a multi-generational lens. To look to our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and even the generations beyond them.

Can you imagine a long line of descendants and an everlasting line of people who would say that they know and worship God and are planning for the long season with Him because of you? Just a thought.