Work of Winter

It was a frigid 21° outside when I woke up yesterday. Seeing that low temperature reading on the weather app of my phone made me cringe before I ever crawled out of my warm bed.  I hate to be cold.  It’s like torture to my skin.  I imagine my external tissue layers trying to pull themselves inward toward my core to avoid the harsh feeling at the surface.  

I pulled on the sweatshirt laying by my bed just to feel less cringe-y even though the thermostat was maintaining a pleasant 70 degrees inside the house.  It was the thought of facing a temperature much less than that outside that made me cozy into my layers as I rushed about the morning routine – an arduous effort to get four kids ready and out the door to four different schools and myself to work at a decent time.  The layers were to prepare me for that dreaded moment – that cringeworthy feeling – when I would step from the nice 70 degree house into the arctic temperature waiting just outside the door.  

As I settled into the dread, my youngest son walked into the bathroom where I was getting ready.  “Momma, look out the window.”  Not knowing what exactly caught his eye, I hesitated, lifting only one slat of the blinds, just to peek out, as if the cold could reach in and grab me…Then as I saw what Hunter saw and felt God stir me to look with my spiritual eyes, I raised the blinds to more fully see the beauty outside.  The frost-covered field behind our house looked as if snow had fallen.  Beyond the field, the sun hung just above the peak of the mountain as it met the sky.  And closer to the house, the trees, having lost most of their leaves in preparation for Winter, were beautiful in their bare form.   

Sometimes it’s hard to notice the beauty of in-between times.  Especially if we’re focused on the cold we’re feeling as it settles in around us. It’s hard to feel thankful for the winters of life when they feel tortuous, when we dread what’s outside or what’s coming next.  It’s hard when we don’t know how long winter will last.  It’s hard to look past the place where we find ourselves and imagine what’s to come as our winter phases into a new season.  

As I drove the kids to school yesterday, my eyes were drawn to how everything looks as Winter settles upon it – the ground and trees beautiful in themselves in their stark state, but the process that takes place in them even more fascinating and beautiful.

Dormancy begins in Autumn when leaves fall so that trees don’t expend energy in keeping them alive during Winter.  After losing their leaves to prepare for the colder, darker season, trees no longer make energy for themselves through photosynthesis and instead depend on energy that has been stored inside them. In order to use their stores more sparingly in the winter, trees slow down their metabolism and stop processes that consume energy, such as growth and reproduction.  During the shift from winter to spring, as days are warmer and have longer periods of sunlight, trees go through a series of subtle changes as they “wake up” from their wintertime rest. 

Isn’t this similar to what we experience in life as we move from one season to another?  We shed the leaves of the previous season as we enter a season of waiting.  Our survival during the winter depends on what we’ve stored up to this point.  We wait out the dormancy and the cold of our in-between, eager for warmer days and sunlight on our skin, until we start to notice those signs of our soul coming back to life.  The new shoots and blooms – the new growth – all the more beautiful come spring if the winter was especially long and dark.  

Friend, I’ve been there.  I’ve written other blogs about it.  Only, I didn’t fully realize my winter until there were signs of spring.  I had lost so much of myself that it took a long “in-between” before I started noticing what had been dormant for too long.  I pray this piece encourages you to see some Truth.  God is at work in your waiting.  Sometimes He works on your circumstances, lining things up to get you where He intends so that He can accomplish His ultimate will for your life.  Sometimes He works on and in YOU, using what He’s stored inside from your life to this point – the strength, the faith, the fortitude – to get you through to the next season.  And there will be a next season – an end to the in-between.  Some point in time when He shows you not just the spring you’ve been waiting for but also the beauty of the underlying work of winter.