Duality in the Seasons
"Most of us only want to see the beauty of the season. But there is beauty in the bewilderment and pain, too."
The Work of the Seasons
Last week, the boys and I accompanied my husband on a work trip to the beach in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. Approaching our destination, with the first sighting of sandy roadsides, Wings1 stores, and the ocean teasing me with its peek-a-boo game in between the buildings along the shore, I excitedly anticipate what’s to come of our beach trip in the days ahead. Beach trips are summer to me, and just being in the presence of the beach feels like that mood ring I tried on as a kid2, turning from stressed-orange to relaxed-deep purple. It’s almost as if summer is giving me permission to breathe after a season of deep transition and change had left me holding my breath.
But I know summer, like all of the seasons, is not just taking in beautiful ocean vistas and tall glasses of ice cold lemonade on the porch; there is work to be done, too.
That satisfying exhale after a spring season of transition and change, will soon be followed by the next deep inhale as summer’s work arrives. The rhythm of the seasons and the work needing to be done in them is as natural as our body taking one breath after another. But this labor I speak of is not laying mulch or pulling weeds in the garden; it’s finding the purpose in the pain. Most of us only want to see the beauty of the season. But there is beauty in the bewilderment and pain, too. Our spiritual and personal growth is the fruit of our season’s labor.
Duality of life in our Seasons
This concept of the duality of life in our various seasons keeps showing up for me. The Lord has placed so many examples and conversations around this topic that it was time for me to do my best at putting them to words and share them with you. I recently asked my therapist, “Why does this concept seem so new to me when it’s as old as time3?” I learned that long-suffering can do that. You can’t truly appreciate beauty for all it’s worth until you have suffered through the discipline of pain. It reminds me of a poem I wrote for my daughter before her first residential treatment facility admission, There Wouldn’t Be Rainbows Without Any Rain.
Of these examples that the Lord is putting in front of me, I recently read Parker Palmer’s profound essay, “There is a Season”. Mr. Parker states, ““Seasons” is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all—and to find in all of it opportunities for growth…
…Transformation is difficult, so it is good to know that there is comfort as well as challenge in the metaphor of life as a cycle of seasons.”4
For some of us, seasons marked by pain seem to last forever. I’m raising my hand over here. But, despite this feeling, seasons come and seasons go. Those of us with our hands raised might find those words alone to be balm to our souls. Our family is still waiting for our long-suffering season to come to an end and knowing it will do just that5, provides hope. But the growth we gain in these seasons are making us more like Christ, and we don’t want to miss out on that.
“For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” Philippians 1:6
What if I were to have walked through this season not acknowledging the pain or finding purpose in it, remaining in that place I was three years ago with denial, anger, and frustration…I would not be an authoritative voice on this subject now. The reason I began writing6 is to put to words this growth, this ‘becoming’ I am experiencing with finding purpose in my pain in hopes that I can help others do the same. I sat for a long time in my pain, not feeling anything other than pain. I wasn’t open to receiving anything positive from it. I was denying its existence and wrestled with my anger towards God for not taking it away or making it any easier. But then, the season of bitterness and denial, anger and frustration lifted like a dense fog. And when everything became clear, I saw how I was changed. For the better. Despite my pain. Praise God.
Pain has a way of making itself known. I have a feeling if I had continued to ignore the purpose in mine, God would have eventually lit the neon sign, ‘I’m trying to teach you something here, Kelly. I’m trying to grow you.’ I’m reminded of a quote made famous by C.S. Lewis from his book, The Problem of Pain,
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Through my pain, I learned more about God’s character than any bible study or sermon. Through my pain, I learned how grace truly works. Through my pain, I learned that God loves me too much to keep me comfortable and pain-free. I learned that he sustains, that he provides, and that he comforts from living through something where those qualities of God were proven instead of merely reading about them in my Bible.
Embrace the ‘and’
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.”7
These oft-referenced words from the book of Ecclesiastes suggest that in each season, there is this paradoxical experience happening. The word ‘and’, used to bring both experiences together, shows us that these two experiences, one seen as positive and the other, negative, happen during the same season.
Are we spending too much time focusing on one and not the growth that can occur from the other? This scenario could be true for both sides of the ‘and’.
It’s easy to see how we can stay focused and spend too much energy on the positives. They’re fun, and easy to linger in. But missing out on the lessons we could learn and the growth we can gain from the pain would be doing ourselves a disservice; not to mention, that lingering could also cause us to cross a line into self-indulgence and then our pleasure ultimately becomes our sin struggle. The same is true the other way around. If we spend too much time in the negatives, not appreciating the gifts and beauty that God gives us daily, we become bitter toward God and that, of course, leads to bigger problems.
One of my favorite poets, William Blake, in his poem, Auguries of Innocence8, has this to say of this ‘and’ we speak of in the duality of life:
It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
The ‘and’ of Job and Moses
Sometimes the ‘and’ can look like this: you’ve done absolutely everything you could do, perhaps you did everything right and still things don’t turn out the way you’d hoped.
Job is a perfect example. As a righteous and holy man, blameless and upright in God’s eyes, he did everything right. He even went above and beyond by taking measures, such as burnt offering sacrifices, to ensure his children hadn’t sinned. And he lost his servants, his livestock, his children, his wealth, his health, and his reputation in the community. Things were not what he had expected or hoped for.
In our case, when our daughter became sick and our life was turned upside down, we tried everything from therapists and the best doctors, corporate fasting and prayer, to medicine and even a pastor of deliverance. We left no stone unturned and were on a relentless fight to get her back. And yet, we are worse off today than we were back then. She is in another residential treatment facility and my husband and I don’t know who we are talking to when we have our 15 minute family call conversations.
Moses obeyed (most) of God’s commands, leading the Israelites out of slavery and into the Promised Land. God even performed miracles through Moses along this journey. And he still didn’t make it into the Promised Land.
Embracing the ‘and’ when it looks like these examples is simply a matter of trusting God and his plans for our ‘becoming’. He is the author of our story. We can do everything right, and it still doesn’t turn out the way we would have written our story.
Finding the ‘Hidden Wholeness’
Embracing the ‘and’ takes endurance. The ‘and’ is the foundation of the work we need to do for growth.
“And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” James 1:4
Lacking nothing brings us to a completeness, a wholeness. I’ll refer back to Parker Palmer’s essay9 with his thoughts on this wholeness and how it relates to this paradox of life,
For me, the words that come closest to answering those questions are the words of Thomas Merton: “There is in all visible things…a hidden wholeness.” In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of the “hidden wholeness.” In a paradox, opposites do not negate each other—they cohere in mysterious unity at the heart of reality. Deeper still, they need each other for health, as my body needs to breathe in as well as breathe out. But in a culture that prefers the ease of either-or thinking to the complexities of paradox, we have a hard time holding opposites together. We want light without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter, and the Faustian bargains we make fail to sustain our lives. When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. But if we allow the paradox of darkness and light to be, the two will conspire to bring wholeness and health to every living thing.
Easing into Summer – the whole summer
While at the beach last week, I felt summer easing into my bones.
I soaked up sunrises at 5:40 am with my boys and husband; I soaked up the sweetness of my boys’ sweet sleeping faces, facing each other, as they shared a double bed in our hotel room; I soaked up sun on my skin and face while inhaling the salty air, slower pace, and a book; I soaked up the sights and sounds that speak to my soul: waves crashing, Indian blanketflower peppered along the beaches, the gulls laughing, all the gorgeous seashells, each one a treasure to behold.
But I also felt the sadness of not having my daughter there with us. I felt the pain of so many beach trips that she’s missed out on. I mourned the years she’s lost with our family, the years I’ve lost as a mother to a daughter.
“a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,”
As I type this, I’m sitting out on my screened in porch and I hear the early summer symphony of birds singling sweetly, children playing and laughing outdoors in the neighborhood, and my dog lightly snoring, asleep at my feet. The energy and the rest. The pain and sweetness. The beauty and the pain.
That’s summer for me.
Note: I wanted to quote and paraphrase Parker Palmer’s entire essay. It’s incredibly profound and thoughtful as he details each season with beautiful metaphors of life in the seasons. I do hope you will read it. Read it here.
Journal Prompt/Questions for Reflection
It took a long time for me to recognize that God was doing a work in me during my season of pain and long suffering. If I would have recognized it sooner, it would have helped me with moving forward and brought me closer, instead of feeling distant, from the Lord.
What season are you in right now? Are you able to identify, then embrace, the duality and hidden wholeness within this current season? If you are having a hard time recognizing what it is, because often we do (remember, we want to only see the beauty of the season, and not the bewilderment), ask God to reveal it to you to help you identify opportunities for growth.
Note: This is hard work, friend. It may take time. When I was figuring this out, I wish I would have received God’s abundant grace more freely than I did. I sought therapy to help me sort through my thoughts and feelings and that helps. I also relied on others to pray and hope for me when I felt like I couldn’t for myself. If you are struggling in a hard season, please do not walk it alone. There is always help available.
These beach ‘super stores’ have always been a beach bench mark. At a very young age, I would buy seashells with my own money in these stores. I’d always look for keychains and beach memorabilia with my name on it. Now, I take my kids to them for beach toys, floats, sunglasses or anything else we may have forgotten for our trip. Apparently, the names Luke and Andrew are too old school now as they don’t have keychains for their names. Naomi and Derrick were never able to find any.
Mood rings were also something I always tried on at these beach super stores
The duality of life begins with God creating the heavens AND the earth, the light AND the darkness, day AND night, sky AND land, man AND woman, good AND evil
Parker Palmer’s essay available here. You must fill out the download prompt to receive a copy. I highly recommend reading it!
We also recognize that God could choose to NOT deliver us from this pain on this side of heaven. Even if he doesn’t, he is good and faithful.
and the entire reason I began this Substack
Auguries of Innocence by William Blake
I see myself so clearly in your story, I’m so many ways. Profound sickness bringing such deep loss, grief like waves of the ocean crashing over your soul so you think you will drowned. . . BUT God. Psalm 91 is true. He sends His angels to pick us up in their arms lest we dash our foot against a rock. We may still be surrounded by a flooding torrent, but we will NEVER be lost at sea. God is our Father who delights in giving good gifts to His children, even the Holy Spirit when we ask Him. So go, ask, seek and find.