Lesson 1: To Everything There Is a Season

Winter, though distant on the horizon, is still in sight. And ’round these parts, winter means snow. Now I’ll be the first to say (usually about a day after the first snow fall), “Alright already! I’ve had enough. Give me Spring or give me death!” (What? So I’m a little dramatic), but I’ve come to understand, that my garden needs Winter. She needs the time to rest, to retreat, to hibernate. And for many of our flowers, one of their most important periods of growth is during those frozen Winter months.

There have been times, when I have faced the winter of life, times where it seems as though I was under a blanket of snow. And I’ve found that in these times, I too retreat and pull in. I hibernate, in a sense, until I can make sense.

But I’ve also found that sometimes it wasn’t necessarily as dreary as I thought. Other times, it was. But regardless, I’ve learned that in spite of the darkness, I, like my garden, was being prepared for the coming Sun. I was undergoing some of my most important periods of growth. And much like my garden, come Spring, the hard, frozen Earth, gives way to fuller blooms than the year before. But I needed Winter in order to get there.

God wasn’t just waxing poetic when he said, “To everything there is a season.” For without the freeze of winter, we wouldn’t understand the warmth of Spring. And without the blaze of summer, we wouldn’t appreciate the cool of Fall. Without sadness, we wouldn’t understand joy. And without darkness, we wouldn’t appreciate light.

The seasons and cycles my garden endures teaches me that I need the cold and the dark as much as I need the warmth and the light. For in them I find the time to every purpose under heaven.