Late August is one of my most favourite times of the year.
I’m not good with the cold, so I’m not a fan of winter. Here in Australia, August is the last month of winter.
And in our region of the world, this is when the canola crops come into bloom.
To me, the bright yellow flowers streaking the landscape signify two things:
- The end of winter – hooray!
- New beginnings – spring is here!
I can’t help but smile when I see the canola, and whoop for joy. “Canola!!” I can be heard yelling in the car as we drive along the road.
Obviously the colour is just gorgeous, and it brings the landscape to life in such a vibrant way.
But canola also reminds me of a difficult time in my life, when everything as I knew it had been upended. Everything had changed – my family, my friends, where we lived. Moving back home to a country town also meant I was now cut off from resuming my IT career. This hurt a lot because it felt like a total loss. Everything else could be reclaimed or rebuilt. But not this – not while being so far away from the city where all the jobs were.
Over time, God opened up a new avenue for me – to do fiction editing. This was something I could do from where I lived and have clients all over the world. I started doing a course one night a week, and this required me to travel by train.
It was August at the time, and the canola was blooming as I went back and forth over a couple of weeks. I loved that I was on the train and able to just sit and admire the canola.
One of those moments that I was on that train, taking in the beauty before me, it suddenly hit me: God was providing another career path for me. Not just one that I could do (turns out I was pretty good at it), not just one that built upon skills I already had (how? I’ll explain another time), and not just one that I could do from my new location (which I’d decided I wanted to stay in) … but it was also one that I LOVED.
The joy that overflowed in that moment is indescribable. What an amazing God we have – that he would resurrect something completely new out of the ashes, just for me.
And that’s what I remember every time I see the canola. It reminds me of God’s amazingness – and his amazing love for me. It’s the true promise of spring – God’s spring of beautiful new beginnings.
So it was only fitting that when Thomas a few years later we got married in August and had photos taken in canola fields.
(P.S. in case you’re confused because you know I’m no longer fiction editing … God had a plan in that too, but that’s a story for another time!)
Photo Credits: top image, and above, taken by the amazing Rachel Deane of Finishing Image Photography
Below: a photo I took a couple of weeks ago of a massive canola field just out of town
