It’s been a minute. Thank you for grace and continuing on the journey with me 🙂
I got up at 4:30 am to run with my running group this morning. It was a balmy 49 degrees here in Chicagoland. I ran less than a week ago in 4 degree weather.
Winter comes and winter goes.
There are still many weeks in our winter season here. It is highly possible that we will again have single digit weather and plenty of snow. But not this morning. I didn’t have to put on ten layers of clothes on this February day and I am thankful.
Even in hard places, the winters of our soul, we may get a reprieve.
Though I firmly believe we are made for joy, it is an apt analogy to call all of our lives in this broken world, a wintering. Sure, there are springs of new beginnings as daffodils push their stubborn way through lingering cold. There are summers of swimming, hiking and lazy, hazy days. And there is the Fall ablaze crashing loudly into her faithful bare limbed companion.
But the winters we can feel in our soul bones are often real and prolonged as we await a new heaven and a new earth.
Yet, there is the gracious reprieve amid our sighing breath. We can see our Savior, Jesus, as he touches us on the shoulder and calls us to look up to the hope of face-to-face with Him coming to fruition soon. Our spirit eyes can see that glistening smile and the understanding tears upon his lovely face.
Every gazing moment upon him is an intended reprieve.
Today’s balmy reprieve was not only one of degrees. I have been weathering a season where a lingering heaviness, the compounded grief of my beloved parents and now, too, a true friend and psychiatrist no longer in this world. There’s been the ache of dormant dreams, wondering if I am truly seen and known, and a good amount of undefined restlessness, even angst.*
But the heavy cold is lifting. Dreams have been awakened and God is finding me in special ways.
I breathe deeply and thank Him. It is true that winter is a part of that weaning from our desires for this earthly home, as our own leaves of temporal growth loosen and fall. The flourishing in this world’s eyes is a passing thing and we come to know it. Hence, our lives are indeed, a wintering.
Yet the painful loss of our desires for fame or fortune or some other fleeting thing is never the end.
He is ever present. He brings new life from our necessary dying to what cannot remain if we want Him. And in this new life is our sustaining joy amid the winters of desolation on this long road home.
Oh friend, how I pray you are touched by a thawing to the wintering of your life this side of Heaven. He is with you as your Immanuel and his eternal spring of life is calling to you for the reprieve. May you receive it today.
*As I continue to walk my mental health journey, it is always good to be honest in my experience. The loss of my psychiatrist did threaten to send me into depression. But, I reached out in vulnerability for prayer and talked it through with my new psychiatrist. I also got a light box to help with the winter gray as my beloved doctor had encouraged me to do when I moved from sunny Florida. Whether you have a clinical diagnosis or not, be sure to give yourself loving honesty and reach out as the need arises. I am just an email away and others may be even closer. You are never alone.
Apple trees (and probably other fruit trees) need a certain number of hours of cold to produce fruit. That is why places further south can’t grow apples. Is there something there to chew on?