Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: September 15

“For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away” ~ Song of Solomon 2:11-13

The voice of our Beloved does not call us to “come away” because “The winter is past, the rain is over and gone.” He does not call us because “the flowers appear on the earth” and “the time of the singing of birds is come.” The “voice of the turtle” has nothing to do with the year-long call of the Lord’s voice to His loved ones.

He calls knowing as He does, that only when we answer Him and “come away” from our self-life, we will be able to look about us and see that “the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”

Until we “come away,” until we follow Him in every area of our lives, we just don’t know its spring all over! It IS spring. But we’re too deep in the dishwater of monotony to have noticed it. Our Beloved never recommends shirking our daily work. One of the ways He has come to me [Eugenia Price, the author] most strikingly is not at the actual “time of the singing of birds,” but at the “time of the washing of the dishes”! He has come as I have remembered that the presence of Christ puts a glow on ANYTHING. I have been most aware that “the vines with the tender grape give a good smell” when emptying the wastebaskets in a filthy ice-rutted Chicago alley!

But I wasn’t aware of it until I allowed the very fact of the bulging wastebaskets to remind me than in Him, there were no dirty ice-choked Chicago alleys.

“In Him … the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth.”