It can be mighty hard to find joy in a season, any one of them, when the sun hasn’t shown her face for days and days, and there’s nothing but brown and twig out there to look at. If you venture out there at all, that is, what with the wind whipping like it’s just learned how to fly and is showing off.

There’s not even a flake on ground or branch, and this so bothers me, not only because it’s just not the way the world should look in the middle of winter, but also because the leaves that I forgot to finish getting rid of last fall are still out there, mocking me.

It’s like Mother Nature has decided she’s not putting up decorations this year.

Not that I’m complaining. Because who in the world would complain about not having to shovel path and drive?

But still. Snow is pretty, and one might even say that some physical exercise, in the form of shoveling, isn’t all that bad for you. Not to mention getting out in the fresh – albeit cold – air.

I’d never go so far as to ask Her to drop a few feet every week, but maybe a few inches every few weeks would be nice.

There’s a season for everything, right?

When it’s August the brambles are bare, it’s just not okay. And when it’s well past the solstice and well before the equinox and the ground is bare, well, that doesn’t seem okay either.

It is going to snow. I know this. There’s a forecast for half a foot or more this very week, which is encouraging.

And I will wake to find my walkway filled to the brim with powder, or worse – the wet stuff – and I will have to pull on a hat and gloves and pull out a shovel and shovel my way out and that is okay too, because that’s what winter is supposed to be sometimes.

That’s what life is supposed to be sometimes – a big, beautiful mess that you have to shovel out, work out, figure out, and muddle through.

This is what life is. Beautiful and hard and sweet and stormy.

Warm luscious blackberries waiting to be picked and savored one minute, then wet heavy snow waiting to be moved the next one. And we do the picking and savoring and moving, each in turn and each in season, and if we’re paying attention we notice each moment for the miracle it is and are appropriately awed.

But we, humany-humans that we are, mostly do not notice.

Mostly we complain. About the brambles and the bugs and the work, and the cold and snowbanks that block our vision when we’re trying to make a turn, and we somehow don’t know that we’re blocking our own vision by shutting our eyes to the miracle of each wonderful and wonder-filled season.

The irony is that when we’re not in that season, we remember it fondly.

Well, that’s another thing we human-types are good at – irony.

But grace just keeps on delivering blackberries and forgiveness and snow and ice and second chances. Though I must say sometimes the timing isn’t what we’d all prefer. (Also, She never asks me when to deliver each, which is a shame because I actually have so many suggestions.)

For now, though, I will just have to make do with foggy-ish mornings and whipping winds and not enough sun to suit my tastes, and remember that this too shall pass, and that this too, is grace.

~xo,
LuAnne

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“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” (~Ecclesiastes 3:1) “God answers the mess of life with one word: Grace.” (~Max Lucado)