Winter

I can hardly read the book I'm reading right now. It is a book by Mark Buchanan called Spiritual Rhythm and it is about the seasons of life and learning to embrace and celebrate each one. Of course the first part is about winter. I have had a number of winters in my life, but most recently I feel as though I have been in winter for years, literally. My winter, I think, is sometimes interrupted briefly by another season, but winter always returns and all too quickly. As I read this book, I am weeping, because almost every word resounds in my soul. It is the feelings and the soul wrenching that I try to very hard to hide. And so, since I can't put it into words very well, here are the words of Mark Buchanan:

"Winter shames those in it. It feels like personal failure, something we've caused, or missed, or faltered in. We chide ourselves for being there. We're sure it's our fault. We wonder if we're crazy, lazy, stupid."

"... winter feels all-consuming and never-ending... winter is like that: it has to power to eclipse all the good we've stored up, and to plunge us into a nighttime that seems all we've every known and, worse, all we'll ever know. Winter hides God. It has the power to sever my knowledge about God from my experience of him, and to hold the two apart, so that my theology and my reality become irreconcilable."

"sorrow upon sorrow, trouble upon trouble, loss upon loss. Darkness eclipses light. Sadness consumes joy. Despair overtakes hope."


"Winter is friendless. In it, we experience a terrible, terrifying aloneness. Abandonment. Rejection. Isolation."


"Winter is when your heart is so closed up you can't image it ever opening again, your dreams so buried you can't conceive of them resurrecting."


But here's the thing - in all that darkness there is one thing that remains:
"He entered this darkness for you. There's no darkness in which he hasn't gone. There's no darkness he won't meet you in. There's no darkness that can hide him. There's no darkness he won't, in time, lead you out of."

So, I keep hoping for the break in snow, the early morning birds chirping, the first sign of buds on the trees. . . knowing that no matter what, Jesus is there.