soul seasons, part 1

I don't like cold weather--never have--and so living in Asia, and now Florida, has worked nicely for this warm weather girl.  But after living in Kentucky for a few years, my love of fall grew.  Growing up in Oklahoma, fall was occasionally filled with bright colors, but mostly the leaves turned brown and just fell off the trees.  But Kentucky--wow, the falls were brilliant.  When we moved to Southeast Asia and Facebook came along, I would look with jealousy at my friends' pictures of their little babies in piles of leaves.  Especially the Gingko tree outside of Asbury Seminary (where Pete and I met and got married).  The Gingko tree would hold onto its yellow leaves and then all at once they would fall, and your window of opportunity to get pictures with your family was brief.  You had to time it--get there when the leaves had dropped and were blanketing the ground, but before the grounds crew came to rake them up.  Pete and I were fortunate to enjoy this picture feast twice--once when we were back from Laos with Silas.  Silas was just learning to walk, and I was so excited to get pictures of him standing in the midst of a yellow whirlwind of color, falling into the pile of leaves, laying on the leaves making leaf angels with our arms and legs.  And then once more when we moved back to Kentucky for a year and had Noah.  I still like to glimpse at these photos now and then, because who can deny the beauty of fall?  Even I who has chosen to live in warm tropical climates misses the beauty of fall.

But today I was struck by the rejection of seasons in my own life.  It seems there are seasons in our lives, just as there are seasons in nature.  In that way, living in a tropical climate disconnects us from the reality of soul seasons--and the necessity of experiencing seasons in our own lives.  None of us gets to live an eternal spring or summer--those are the seasons when growth and life flourishes.  But fall and winter remind us that even the trees and plants need a season of death and rest so that life can come once again.  Even in places where we do not experience a true fall or winter, I can still see the pause that comes in the cooler months.  It's not as dramatic as up north, but it's still there--a time of resting when the greens are not as bright and brilliant.  In Laos the winter months meant the cease of rain, and the red dirt began to cover over all of the plants.  So while the trees were still green beneath the dirt, everything looked dead.  By April there was a definite longing in all of us for the rains to start so that everything could be washed and made clean and new again.  

While nature reminds us that death is necessary for life to come once again, it is not something that we welcome in our own lives.  If anything, I can picture myself being the fall tree resisting the natural tendency for my leaves to fall.  "No leaf, don't go!  How can I be a tree without you leaves!"  But the leaves do what is in their nature--they fall.  It is a time of letting go, resting and making room for new life to come again.   

In the last year of our time in Laos I was really fragile.  I was burnt out, emotionally depleted, and physically struggling with health issues.  I was doing everything I could to repair myself, to get better, and to flourish.  It was painful to admit that I didn't have what it took to be a superstar missionary, a superstar mom, a superstar wife.  I was human, and I was fighting my frailty.  But when    I look back on that year now, I see that it was the year I experienced God's arms around me in the form of a group of women.  We would meet each Tuesday afternoon.  It was my lifeline.  I don't think I could have survived that year sanely without that group to look forward to each week.  One week a woman who I didn't know joined our group.  She was visiting from another province in Laos, and she sat in with us.  It was a week when I couldn't hold my tears back, they flowed like a river betraying the feelings of grief, sadness, discouragement I was holding inside.  At the end of our time together, this visiting woman said that she felt she had a verse for me--John 12:24.  

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

I was quiet.  This wasn't really the verse that I had hoped to hear.  How can this be encouraging to me?  This verse speaks of death...going into the winter soil.  But I wrote the verse down because somehow I felt it really was for me.  My only hope was that I was experiencing the winter of my soul already--that this verse was not pointing to a winter to come.  Perhaps the verse was saying "your spring is coming".

  to be continued...