Timeless Seasons

I have always loved the changing seasons. I definitely have my favorite times of year, but it has always seemed that when the next season would roll around, I was ready for it to be here. I have specific associations with certain times of year and holidays, as I'm sure you all do. Fall is definitely a favorite for a lot of reasons. I love the colors of fall, crisp cool air, football games, beginning of the school year (yes, I'm a nerd), Thanksgiving, my wedding anniversary, pumpkins, changing colors of the leaves, and the list goes on and on. It is a season that seems to ease us into winter, and there are things I love and hate about winter. I LOVE snow, fires in the fireplace, skiing, the holiday season and by the end I'm cold and tired and ready for spring. Spring is new life, green, rain, and the beginning of warmer weather and going OUTSIDE. When you have young children who have been indoors for several months, being outside is very important to everyone's sanity. Spring smells amazing, especially in the mountains. Summer is hot. I don't love summer, but I love vacation and being with friends and family, celebrating the 4th, cooking out and watching my boys (all three of them) who love to play in the water. Then, the cycle continues, and at the end of summer, I am always ready for Fall again and the cool breezes it brings as a relief from the heat. 

Today, I finished a book and it enlightened me as to why I love the whole premise of seasons, change and the constancy of it all. We are all created with an understanding, however hidden it may be, of what it all represents. On the surface, it tends to only be changes in weather, different holidays and making wardrobe choices more difficult. However, it has a much deeper meaning that actually resides within our souls.

The way Francine Rivers depicts this symbolism is so beautiful in The Last Sin Eater (oh my gosh, if you haven't read this book, read it, now!):

The gift I needed had already been given; the evidence of it was all around me, everywhere I looked, even in the air I breathed. For hadn't it been God himself who had given me life and breath?

I kept thinking about Granny. I remembered how we'd sit on the porch, melting and waiting for the hot summer day to end in the relief of nightfall. In the thankful cool, we'd stare up into the infinite black sky with glitters twinkling while the lightning bugs sparkled like fallen stars in the woods round about us.

In the fall, Granny'd send me off to capture one monarch butterfly from the thousands that migrated. She'd hold the jar a long while just looking at the pretty thing. "From a worm this came. Don't that beat all?" And then she'd take the top off the jar and watch it flutter away.

First frost had been an event to Granny Forbes, for with it came the high mountain gold and the soft winds that stirred up blizzards of red, pink, orange, and yellow leaves swirling. "The maple's always last to give up its color," she'd aways say. The maple that grew near our cabin was like a red blaze against the encroaching winter gray skies,  its leaves like crimson sparks on the dead brown ground.

Granny would sit by the window during winter and look out at the snow heaping or watch the icicles' slow growth from the eaves of the front porch. They'd catch the sunlight and cast a rainbow radiance. Granny was ever hoarding bread crumbs and sending me out to toss them about near the window so that she could watch the towhees, titmice, red cardinals, and mourning doves foraging for the bits of food in the vast white. During the ice storms and long bleak nights of winter, she'd tell me the mountains were like sleeping giants that'd come awake again soon. "God'll see to it."

And God did. Those mountains always did wake up, without fail. Year after year, the earth came back to life again with what Granny called "God-green." She always said no matter how much you watered, you couldn't get the same color that came with a single rain of the life-bearing water of heaven.

Now I knew why it happened that way, what Granny was trying to show me in words she didn't have. It was no accident, no coincidence, that the seasons came round and round year after year. It was the Lord speaking to us all and showing us over and over again the birth, life, death, and resurrection of his only begotten Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, our Lord. It was like a best-loved story being told day after day with each sunrise and sunset, year after year with the seasons, down through the ages since time began.

I knew after hearing the word of the Lord, I'd never walk anywhere again without seeing Jesus as a babe in the new-green of spring. I'd never see a field in all its glory without thinking how he lived his life for us in the royal robes of every summer wildflower. I'd ever see the greatness of his love in the beautiful sacrifice in the brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows of fall, and winter white would always speak to me of his death. And then spring again, his resurrection, life eternal.

I cannot say it any better, but I can identify with it, rest in it, rejoice in it and simply be thankful for it, everyday...no matter what the season, weather or circumstances of the moment.