Seasons

In spring, everything is new.  Grass is green, leaves decorate the trees, birds soar through the sky and sometimes, into my windows.

A bird has been smacking into our windows for a month now.  It is irritating.  We’ve resorted to covering the windows so we have less bird poop to clean up, because when birds smack into your windows, they tend to make a mess.

My irritation is mild; it is just a season.  Sometimes you have a carefree spring, and all your grass grows evenly, and all your flowers bloom, and it rains a little, and the sun shines a little, and everything is beautiful.  Then other years, a wayward robin with a screw loose decides that he has found his mate in his own reflection seen in your unscreened windows and makes a mess and a nuisance of himself.

It’s the same with life.  Seasons pass in life where there seems to be nothing but rain, nothing but night, nothing but darkness and confusion.  Then the clouds give way to another season where everything is light, love, happiness and hope.

When a person is a parent they go through seasons of child-rearing.  Having babies is a season.  So is having school-aged children, then teenagers, then grown children who have children of their own.

When people are ill they go through a season.  Illness and recovery are separate seasons, as is the self-identification of being healthy once again.

As the seasons in our lives change, so do we.  We are shaped by our seasons.  I am a totally different person now than I was when I was a teenager, even when I was a new mom.  Events and life experiences changed me, molded me into the person I am.  Seasons of life make us who we are.

Seasons can also repeat themselves.  As spring gives way to summer, then to fall and winter, spring will come again.  It is never exactly the same, but is familiar each year.  So it is with life.  I may find myself in an unpleasant season a second or even third time.  Maybe there is a new lesson to learn; maybe I haven’t learned from my previous mistakes.

It can be irritating, just like that robin banging into our windows.

But also like the robin, God is with me.  Just as he takes care of the birds and the flowers, he also takes care of my needs, sees my struggles with certain seasons.  He helps me become aware of how one season leads to the next.  He helps me search for ways out of a current frustrating season; he helps me recognize attributes of a wonderful one.  He helps me prepare for a new season and leave an old one behind.

God may allow me to bang my head into a window for a season to avoid repeating it.  The pain that results is my lesson to avoid the steps that led to that season of headaches.

Maybe he'll do the same with that robin.

*******

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.  Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NLT)

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable than they?  Matthew 6:26 (NIV)