The Gift of Consequences
When we came back home to Tennessee in 1993, we moved to Cookeville for Ray to serve as a minister. We had yet to find a house, so a sweet member of our new church invited us to stay with her until we found something to buy. She had been widowed for a second time only a few months before. In those three weeks, we became lifelong friends.
We found a beautiful vintage home on a street in the heart of town. I especially liked the pretty staircase that greeted you when you walked in the front door. We also found a house on an acre lot in a subdivision on the edge of town. If the vintage house had been on the edge of town, my opinion would have been easy to form. That would have been a great combination.
Two factors formed my opinion to share with Ray.
- The house in town was near the university and next door to a small apartment complex. As much as I liked the house, I didn’t think being next door to college men was the best place for our pretty and innocent preteen daughter.
- The view from the house in town was the town. As I told Ray, “We have been in Illinois where the land is flat. I want to live where I can see that we are in Tennessee.”
Both kinds of neighborhoods have their advantages. Town or city life gives opportunities to see more of the amazing people God made in His image and what they do every day. The other two houses we had owned by then had been on town streets. As much as I had enjoyed our close neighbors and walks in those neighborhoods, this time I wanted to see God’s natural creation from our very own yard.
Ray and I were of the same mind. We bought the house on the edge of town. When I picture that subdivision in my mind today, I think of lots of green. Our views here in the country where we came in 2004 are also very green, and now we really see the beauty of God’s Creation everywhere.
A friend from South Dakota was visiting Tennessee recently and asked me if it rains a lot in Tennessee. I told him, “Yes, it does. That’s why everything is so green.” Then I looked up his state’s average annual rainfall and ours on a random website that may or may not be exactly accurate but gave us a general idea. At 22.02 inches of rain a year, South Dakota ranked 42nd in annual rainfall. At 51.85 inches per year, Tennessee ranked fifth. His question reminded me of a conversation I had many years ago with a homeschool mama who had moved to Tennessee from Idaho (which ranked 45th in rainfall on that chart I looked up). She was almost depressed by all the rain. That’s when I realized that rain is the price we pay for all this pretty green.
This is the Roaring River. A lot of the rain that isn’t watering green things in our neck of the woods ends up here.
And here are some of the flowers and plants this year’s rains are watering in our yard.
I wasn’t the only one enjoying our garden last Saturday. So was this colorful tree swallow.
To enjoy the green, we must endure the rain. When God created the world, He gave us the gift of order, the gift of cause and effect, the gift of consequences. Childhood is the best time to learn well the reality of consequences. These lessons will serve children well for the rest of their lives.
To pursue what is good we must flee from what is bad.
But flee from these things, you man of God,
and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith,
love, perseverance and gentleness.
1 Timothy 6:11
To live righteously we must have discipline.
All discipline for the moment
seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful;
yet to those who have been trained by it,
afterwards it yields
the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
Hebrews 12:11
To learn we must listen.
The way of a fool is right in his own eyes,
But a wise man is he who listens to counsel.
Proverbs 12:15
To reap eternal life, we must sow to the Spirit.
For the one who sows to his own flesh
will from the flesh reap corruption,
but the one who sows to the Spirit
will from the Spirit reap eternal life.
Galatians 6:8