Seasons

Here's a question to consider: do you know when the seasons change?

Maybe now you're looking at your calendar or performing a quick Google search, and you're thinking, "Yes. Six days from now, it will be winter." And that's true, but only partially true. It's kind of a made-up truth, and one that has severely limited our ability to embrace the seasons in our lives.

See, we're surrounded by these artificial seasons. We're surrounded by these hard and fast lines between one season and the next. Not just in terms of summer, fall, winter, and spring, but in other areas of our lives, as well. The end of the year, for example, as though there's anything special about the transition between one Thursday and Friday (this year) and any other. Or maybe around your birthday - again, a clear but artificial transition between what seems like one thing and what seems like another. 

Sometimes, it's something that doesn't come along on a predictable basis, but feels like something all the same. A transition at work. A promotion. A wedding. A birth. The end of another semester. Graduation. Our list could go on and on as we think about all these days, all these occasions that seem to draw us from one season into another.

But all of these things are times when we're already moving, when it just takes one more step in the same direction to move from one thing to another. The real question of seasons, the question that creation itself asks, is: do you know when to move? I think the value of this question cannot be overstated, and it is a question we've all but lost sight of in favor of the "big moments."

From Jeremiah 8:7 - Even storks know when it's time to return. Mourning doves, swallows, and cranes know when it's time to migrate. But my people don't know....

When I read these words, I'm struck by the contrast between the birds and men. The birds migrate and return, not because the calendar tells them that the seasons are changing. Not because their dream house came on the market at just the right time. Not because they were transferred at work. Not because they graduated college and it's time to move on. No, they migrate and return because they know when it's time. And how does a bird know it's time? 

Because it senses the changes in the wind.

That's it. That's all. The winds start to change in one direction or another, the tiniest, subtlest little change that most of us are too busy to even notice, and they change the entire course of their flight to follow the winds. 

It's something I'm trying to be more intentional about in my life. I'm tired of living from one big moment to the next, always thinking that life is just a series of these defining moments. I'm tired of waiting for the next big thing to happen, of feeling stuck in this season because nothing big has happened to end it.

The truth is, more often than I move, I feel the winds blowing in my life. It's the quietest, subtlest, tiniest little thing, but I feel the winds blowing on me, urging me in another direction. Not because this season has ended, but because it's starting to change. And that doesn't mean I have to give up everything I'm doing now. It doesn't mean I abandon things mid-stream. It just means I adjust my life to go with the holy winds, and that I take the important things along with me.

It means I turn my life in a slightly different direction to go where God is taking me, and some things turn with me. And some things don't. And that's life. That's a season.

So my question for you is this: Do you know when to move?

Even the stork knows when to move. Even the mourning doves, the swallows, and the cranes know when to move. They feel the winds blowing.

Where are the holy winds blowing you?