Seizin' the Season

By D. Dean Benton

Seasons do change. Fifteen years ago during an economic downturn I began to ask what will our local world look like when this season shifts upward? What skills will be needed? What mindsets? Worldviews? The season changed, for sure! I had been praying for my grandchildren and friends to be filled with peace, plans, perspective, proportion and productivity. I soon realized I was missing the most crucial of all needs: perception. The directives of Psalm 37 are containers for catching and dispensing God's Word in the most practical terms and places--new job, new challenge, new decade--a new season to seize. Seizin' the Season is finding what equips and empowers us to fulfill God's plans and our dreams in a world of turbulence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Dean Benton
• Release date: Feb 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005457167

D. Dean Benton

A native Iowan, husband of one, father of two and grandfather of three. A pastor, seminar leader, author of 27 print books and 15 ebooks, singer, songwriter. After 14 years in the pastorate, Dean and his wife Carole, with family, worked in concerts, seminars and conferences for three decades before returning to the pastorate. The Bentons worked in forty states in about 3000 venues.

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Seizin’ The Season

Creating Space for Sum & Substance

D. Dean Benton

Copyright 2022 by D. Dean Benton. Published by D. Dean Benton at Smashwords.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading the ebook. This book remains the copyright property of D. Dean Benton and may not be distributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Preface

Chapter One: Can You Make Cornbread?

Chapter Two :Training Wheels for the Beginning Optimist

Chapter Three: Not On My Homestead!

Chapter Four: Don’t Hunker in Desolation

Chapter Five :Pages From Naomi’s Journal

Chapter Six: Trust Expressed

Chapter Seven: An Open Door—An Open Hand

Chapter Eight: Who’s Going to Fill Their Shoes?

Chapter Nine: The Development Company

Chapter Ten: Release The Blessing

Chapter Eleven: Steward This Well

Chapter Twelve :A Season Seized

Postlude

Notes

Dedication

Appreciation

Other books by author

Connect with D. Dean Benton

Introduction

Seizin’ The Season.

Seizin’ the Season.

That’s seems funny to me! Maybe hilarious.

Which season?

Since the first words were written in this collection of thoughts and questions, you and I have been through enough seasons to give us whiplash. The six-months between the last time an editor used a blue pencil on this manuscript and this writing the world has seen major shifts in morality and basic worldviews. This is not abstract. We—your family and ours have lost friends to Covid while our trust levels in media and politics has dropped to the point of total disgust. Love, joy, peace are facing a threatening season.

Did anything I studied and then wrote in Seizin’ The Season and the companion book, Mining for Reality & Reason during the past dozen years imploring friends and family to Seize the Season make any sense in the long-run?

Someone said if your church marries the current age, it will soon become a widow. If we are equipped to seize this season, will we have knowledge and wisdom to deal with the next?

We will if we do it right. And that’s the point.

Camelot comes to mind. That place where it is illegal for the rain to fall until bedtime and must leave by morning and take the fog with. Snow is not allowed to slush on the hillside. Camelot is where happily ever aftering is not only found but recommended.

Does Camelot have a zip code?

Expanding your expanse, making room for your footprint, creating core space for sum and substance is where we begin. Seizing may suggest to you capturing something and keeping it fenced in. Not what I’m thinking about. Seizing these weirdly strange days demands capturing a vision of the road you are on and where it leads. The person who grasps the opportunities and conquers the negatives will find their own open ranges.

What does a seized season look like? Does Seized Season have a zip code? Can a person go there? Is it on a map? Check Psalm 37:1-9. The verbs there give us directions that enable us to arrive at a life in balance, worth the effort and as abundant as Jesus promises. Trust, do, dwell, enjoy, delight, commit, wait, do not, refrain and turn.

• Trust in the Lord

• Do good

• Dwell in the land

• Enjoy safe pasture

• Take delight in the Lord

• Commit your way to the Lord

• Be still

• Wait patiently

• Do not fret

• Refrain from anger

• Turn from wrath

Getting a hold of those habits and behaviors will result in—

Those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land (Psalm 37:9).

Seizin’ The Season, with the companion book, Mining for Reality & Reason are about interpreting the times, so we are ready for a season change. Seasons do change! Weather, politics, family stages, economics, moods, relationships. There is no road to Camelot where the seasons are controlled by wishes and executive decrees. There are no tour buses for a drive-by. But being influential in your own life is not mythical or merely the ideal. Someone or something will influence your seasons. Psalm37 verbs are tools, at least for those who prepare.

The season I propose we now seize is very specific. The season we are in presents opportunities, choices, decisions and commitments. Our generations live in an age of lawlessness with truth either absent or questioned. The pandemic, social upheaval, institutional decline and electoral battles announce we must examine what we’ve shuffled off to others and what it means to be a Kingdom Seeker.

I was sitting in the car reading when I realized I was no longer reading. I was looking into space with tears on my cheeks or loading up for the trip. Why am I emotional and spiritually sensitized about livestock?

Joel Salatin says in his The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs,¹

"…the sum and substance of our lives should point toward the Goodness of God. And He wants us to understand that how we extend that respect and honor to His creation indicates our level of honoring His specialness.

Glory speaks to uniqueness; what makes God, God, you you, and me me? And a pig a pig. With respect to glory, biblically speaking, God’s glory inherently is no more special than a forest, a pig or a civilization. Respecting the glory of each encourages a respect for all. If we can’t appreciate the pigness of the pig, we can’t appreciate the Godness of God.

The God-ness of God includes the fact He is not static. He is dynamic and acts like it. Seizing is finding what equips and empowers us to fulfill His plans and our dreams in a world of turbulence.

Seizin’ The Season

Creating Core Space

for

Sum and Substance.

Preface

I walked into the Herbert Hoover Museum with few expectations other than to be reminded of stories I had already read or heard. For several days, my restlessness had been unrelenting. An active spirit world lured me as God called me somewhere else to listen to Someone. I believe in an active God who speaks through His Word as written in the Bible, and through words spoken through prophets, inner urgings and incidents too apropos to be incidental. I needed a God said or to have an impartation spoken into my mind, emotions and/or spirit.

When I told my wife we had to get away to see if the Voice could be found, Carole suggested we go to West Branch. If Jesus is in town, this is the place where He’ll be, an old story says. West Branch, Iowa doesn’t immediately come to mind as such a place.

Less than five minutes into the museum something spiritual, physical and emotional began in me. I knew Hoover became a world hero through his feeding programs after World War I, then again after World War II saving more starving people than Hitler and Stalin had killed. Looking at the museum pictures of starvation and poverty and the flour sacks, tore me up. Europeans had been living on black bread made of clay, straw, manure and tiny bits of flour. Then Hoover’s volunteers arrived with bread and soup.

The museum tour leads to a nine-minute video of four people describing the relief effort’s impact on them. A Russian man in the video says his boyhood school teacher handed each student an aluminum plate, glass and utensils while announcing others would come with food to put on the plate, but, first they were to scratch their names into the plates. The man said he carried that plate all the rest of my life. Relief workers came into the room with bread that became known as Hoover Rolls. I can still feel the aroma of that bread, the man said. Feel the aroma? That’s what he said. The bread touched a hunger that exceeded taste or smell.

I sat in front of that screen with tears in my eyes and something going on in my soul. I didn’t know what, but I didn’t want to move. A voice had spoken. Hours later at lunch, Carole asked, Where are you…your head and eyes? I couldn’t name the emotional upheaval or what my response should be. Was it about the tragedy of Hoover who went from world hero to world scapegoat in eight months? Trying to understand how he went from the largest landslide victory in American presidential politics to hatred, revulsion and exile four years later? From being seen as a self-made multi-millionaire and leader of rescue efforts to being called an uncaring high-collared incompetent and the sole source of America’s misery? That could have caused my sympathy, but I knew all of that from both sides of the story—Democratic and Republican. I had recently read the Roosevelt and Hoover versions. What I was feeling was not about Washington politicians, it was way too personal for that, nor was it about an unavoidable historical period that no one could have stopped once it began.

Seizin’ The Season is feeling the aroma. It is about having the tools—with your name engraved—and being ready when God hands you the ball and says now!

"On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, a frail, toothless man sat in his wheelchair, clutching a blue robe and savoring the World Series on one of the new color television sets American consumers were being introduced to that year. Suddenly, Hoover turned to the wife of a younger friend. What did she want most out of life, he wanted to know? Truthfully, she replied, she was content with her lot, satisfied with her home, happy with her husband. For her, the status quo was a worthy aspiration.

"Herbert Hoover drew back in horror. ‘How can you say a thing like that?’ he demanded. ‘I want more. I want to write a better book. I want to have more friends. I just want more!’"²

If we want more, like Hoover, more out of life; if we want to move into the place of more with God, we need personalized containers to catch the manna. The directives in Psalm 37 are containers for catching and dispensing God’s Word in the most practical terms. New job, new challenge, new decade—we are able to Seize the Season.

We are in a season that threatens to revoke any dreams of more. With a simple question pressing into our tomorrows: will we survive and if we do should we downsize all dreams, goals and hopes? In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to pray for family and friends focused on these subjects:

Peace

Plans

Perspective

Proportion

Productivity

After a couple of months, I realized I had forgotten the most crucial of all needs: Perception. Psalm 37 is all about perception: how we perceive yesterday, today and tomorrow. Perceive and