One of the things that I’ve done the most consistently during the past year is to go on walks. With gyms closed in the beginning of the pandemic, I first started walking around my neighborhood and have since moved on to walking in the beautiful greenways in my city. 

One particular greenway has become my favorite. It’s long, eight miles if you go the entire way, and it meanders along a river. If the crickets and frogs are quiet enough, you can hear the sound of the water moving along to its next destination.

The pathway scenery was magnificent in spring, summer, and fall, but winter has been a different story. Some areas held out for a while, but now the only green is some patchy grass right next to the edge of the trail and a few evergreen trees scattered here and there. Now if you were to look around, you’d see crinkled, dark leaves covering the ground underneath bare trees and not much else. You know the forest isn’t dead, but it certainly looks like it is. 

Thanks to science classes and prior experience with the seasons, we know that in just a few short weeks  when spring arrives, the forest will once again burst into life. There will be buds and leaves on the trees. Flowers will begin growing up along the side of the pathway in every color imaginable. The scenery during walks will become a thing of beauty once again.

We understand how the cycle of the seasons work in nature. We understand that God has arranged these cyclical changes. We don’t expect for wildflowers to be in bloom during the middle of the winter. However, in our own lives, we sometimes forget that we too go through seasons. In our culture, there’s a pressure for us to be “in bloom” all of the time. 

God does not expect us to go through life with just one setting of perpetual happiness and productivity. Ecclesiastes 3:4 reminds us there there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance” (NIV). 

There will be times in our lives where we will be sad. There will be times when we need rest. There will be times when we just can’t be everything that we want to be all at once.

While Jesus was on earth, he did not expect for his disciples or for himself to constantly be “on” all the time. In Mark, we find after Jesus and his disciples gave food to a crowd that “because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’” (Mark 6:31, NIV)

In our culture we are sometimes inclined to brag about being so busy doing things that we don’t even have time to eat. We use that statement to show others just how important our work is. We can’t even stop for a moment to take a break to nourish ourselves. 

Expecting ourselves to constantly keep going is just as ridiculous as expecting a plant to continue growing when it doesn’t have the conditions it needs to flourish. We know this doesn’t work for nature, so why would it work for us?

In our lives, we will have times when we are flourishing and blooming just like a plant at the height of its season. Those times are wonderful, but we have to acknowledge that they don’t last forever. And, we can’t beat ourselves up when we aren’t in one of those verdant periods. 

Every season created by God in nature is important, and the seasons we go through personally are necessary as well. We were not made to bloom all of the time, and we are more likely to flourish when we allow ourselves to go along with the season we find ourselves in.

How are you allowing yourself to live in the season you are currently in?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth is an educator at heart. So far this has taken the form of a camp counselor, a museum assistant, and currently a middle school teacher. She loves to watch people grow and learn. You can read more of her writing at her blog Chronicles of a Southern Belle.