The Seasons of Your Soul

Spring, summer, fall, and winter are all part of God’s plan…on earth, and even in our souls. The season of your soul is not weather-dependent. The season of your soul is not necessarily reflective of the season another is experiencing. It is a different manner entirely. Explaining the seasons of the soul, in my limited perspective, is akin to following the growth cycles of a rose:

Spring: roses are leafing out, eager to emerge after winter dormancy. New canes are shooting up, and buds are getting fat. Some will burst, and others are yet to come. Spiritually-speaking, if you are in spring, you may be experiencing a lot of “budding growth”. Perhaps you have come off of a quiet or dark period, and you are seeing some of the early benefits of the “time apart”. You begin to realize that something surely was happening during the “dark period”, even though you couldn’t see it. Maybe you are “testing the waters” with all that’s new, tentatively poking into it like a new baby deer peeking out from behind its mother.

Summer: roses are full throttle, and many are prolifically putting out new blooms to replace the ones that have faded. With the exception of the hottest days of summer, when most living things seem to want to run for cover, roses THRIVE during this time. Good drainage, lots of sun-hours, and the opportunity to release a lot of pent-up energy fuel the roses to show off their God-given beauty. Similarly, if you experience a “spiritual summer”, maybe an area of your life is really bearing amazing fruit, for God’s glory. You can feel that, by His grace, you have come far in an area, though you know there is much, much more to learn. You are making great strides, and you are learning to multiply. Perhaps, like the rose, you are learning that, the more you give yourself away, the more abundance you end up with! (Try cutting a rose and see what happens just below the cut. One cut eventually makes two branches, each with double blooms, and so on.)

Fall: roses are putting on a final, beautiful show before “winter dormancy”. Roses begin to be a little susceptible to some of the hot/cold weather snaps that can leave them a little weak, especially where leaves are concerned. In our “fall” seasons, we are remembering the heydays of summer, when we felt especially fruitful and beautiful in our spiritual journeys, but maybe we are beginning to be plagued by the everyday “little things” that zap our strength a bit. We may be on the threshold of a valley which is coming, which we wish we didn’t have to walk through, but we must, nevertheless.

Winter: except in the warmest places on earth, roses “sleep”. In Alabama, they don’t “sleep” very long. Blooms are nonexistent in winter, and leaves look terrible. A quick wind whips canes, leaving them bald and prickly. Sometimes our souls feel “wintry”. We look at ourselves in the mirror and wonder if that was truly joy and fruit we experienced in the summer, or was it all a dream? To look at ourselves, there is no evidence of any new growth whatsoever; in fact, we sometimes look rather diseased and prickly!

HOWEVER…what every gardener knows, and what the Heavenly Gardener continues to reveal…is that most growth that occurs in both plants and in human embryos takes place before the “finished product” is even able to be viewed! In other words, like the 10 percent/90 percent iceberg illustration, MOST of a plant’s growth is below the ground, invisible to the human eye, but not to God’s! Come Spring, the evidence of winter’s hard lessons and hard knocks is plainly visible, giving hope and inspiration to all.

What’s our lesson? We won’t all be in the same season at the same time. One season may last longer for us than it does for another. Our spring may last twice as long as our fall; our winter may be three times our summer. Only God can help us see the beauty and the blessing of each season, each one of which makes a rose…and a WellSpring Warrior. To God be the glory as He teaches us to say, “Nevertheless” to the valley seasons, and “Only by God’s grace” to the mountaintops.