It’s been a busy two or three days, and, while I did not forget about writing yesterday, I nearly did today.

But it is 9:50pm. So I have time to take a few thoughts and push them into a semblance of order.

I have written about this before about seasonal wholeness, particularly in motherhood, but I experience the regularity of seasons as a grace.

Whether in the world, in our families, or in our struggles, seasons change us, change our experience, and change as we do.

Each season we are given new and important tools to learn, we are given different beauties to appreciate, different ways to care for our places, and different food nourish us. God is in charge of the rotations of the earth that feed us as we circle the sun and invest in doing the needed thing in each season. We don’t control the spinning, the circling or what is needed in each season. The earth spins and circles, and we follow the rhythms God set out in advance. In the cycle of food necessity, we plant, cultivate, harvest and rest. A display of hope in God and his faithful provision.

Winter is cold, there is ice, but it is also sparkling and white alternated with insulated and cloudy. The underground potential is waiting.

In the spring the new life is joyful and fresh with unlimited potential and exhuberant expenditure of energy and resources.

In the summer the growth levels out but continues, hot, steady, long, soothing and tiring.

In the fall natural life pares down responsibilities and stores in resources in preparation for the slow underground wintering.

And the circle continues. Over and again.

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I am glad for seasons. Seasons give me hope and sense of an overarching story or purpose in my life.  Even when I can see only a glimmer of the arch, it’s still in there. Seasons change and we change with it. This brings me a little bit of hope, because in my life I have also seen the seasons in relationships, motherhood responsibility, ability to pursue extra things, tensions and struggles.

I expect things to settle and work out at some point.

I expect life and joy and ease all at the same time without the challenges I’ve come to realize are absolutely normal in a life.

It seems like it is a constant cycle from one difficulty to the next.

Maybe it would help if I also took note of the beauty of the season we are struggling through at the same time. If I paused to take note of a new thing learned about God, the way my kids sometimes belt out Jesus songs, and the hope inspired in life continuing on in a certain way despite many many mistakes and frustrations.

It can be incredibly difficult to weigh the harsh realities of life as we know it with the goodness of God.

Pretty near impossible to reconcile in our own limited understanding within the constraints of our our time and reality. But I am encouraged that this is how life is for now. It is always changing, but God, one outside of time, is always in charge anyway. The master plan is his. My life is completely in His hands.

The difficulties might let up, they may not. They might resolve, they might not. But the underscoring point is that God’s got this, even when we think maybe everything is wrong.

But I like seasons and I like the idea of God caring for us in a way that is different than we imagined. Our future possibility is not limited to our own ability to imagine it.  I like thinking of the difficulties of life as seasonal. I like to embrace obnoxious hope that it will all work out no matter how it seems right now, yesterday, or next year. If I’m hopeful it’s because of who God is.

God’s got this.

Even if it doesn’t work itself in the here and now.

God’s got it.

Our whole together family life looks different at different times, and that is fine.

Some seasons allow for a lot of things deemed normal and necessary.

Some seasons simply don’t.

In each season we get to choose what is right for our own family at the time and we do that.

And just because we don’t do whatever normal activity right now, doesn’t mean we won’t later or that we are a failure as a family because we don’t. Different families need different things to be healthy together or even just to make it through together.

Some times survival mode requires us to ask a little less of ourselves and our people, because more is being asked in other areas of our lives.

Don’t worry about it.

It is just a season.

It will pass and everyone will make it through.

And, as we allow the shape and form and function of our family to bend and mold to our needs as a family of whole people, our family members can return and reform into their whole selves in their own time under God’s careful guidance of all of our souls.

Ideally.

I always speak ideally.

Our homes and families will never feel like the perfect place for our people or to our people. We just won’t fit, there will be conflict, we all mess up perpetually.

But there is always hope and possibility and vision, because God’s in charge and we are not.

Even in the driest or stormiest seasons.

So there’s that.

It’s a perpetual turning of one possibility to the next, creating new life, new perspective, new insight, and new faith in a God who works in the details and the big picture story.

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More to explore seasons:

• a book: Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul
• And an essay wrote a while back: Whole in this Season

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Wishing you the freedom to embrace the need of this season in the midst of your everyday doubts. Because He is able to do far more than we ever asked or imagined.

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This month I am joining the #write31days community to explore the idea of the Whole Together Family because I believe we get be who God created us to be – together. Find the whole list posts here or click on the image.