Do you ever feel like you just completely miss entire seasons?
It’s already April and I remember the snow, ice and cold weather (it’s mostly all still here in high mountain Colorado), but it still feels like winter has just….
flown by.
And more than the weather, the holidays and my sense of passing time seems…
off.
Christmas happened? And Thanksgiving? Wait…. is Lent seriously already over? I mean, I didn’t really participate this year. I just couldn’t. But it’s really already Easter??
Although it’s odd, mostly because normally I enjoy these passing milestones AND I obviously took photos of this season (as a Nikon ad I recently saw said, I am part of “Generation Image: Your Camera is Your Voice” #millennials) I just have this weird, peaceful sense that these seasons come every year, and it’s just OK that I completely missed them this year. I don’t really even have remorse about it. It just happened.
I think one part of it is the absurd amount of hours that Ryan has worked over the past 10 months. With him working so much, and with both of us being fairly introverted, we tended to hole up in the apartment to catch a couple minutes together. The downside of this was that we didn’t have many friends while living in Brighton (this was also an upside for two extremely busy introverts). But the reality is that community and relationships are what help mark the passing of time. They often help distinguish one day from another, one season from another.
It’s also hard to celebrate with friends when you don’t exactly feel like celebrating.
Another big part of all this weird numbness has been affected by my dad’s health issues. He has been in and out (mostly in) of the hospital since October with severe, acute pancreatitis. He’s doing better these days, but it wasn’t until after Christmas that the doctors even told him, “It’s ok. You can breath a little now, you aren’t going to die.”
I’m not even in the same state as my family, and those kind of prolonged health issues of a loved one weigh on a person. You kind of just hold your breath a little bit, hoping somehow that will shove all the health and healing into your dad from 800 miles away. You kind of just want to lay low for a while, while he’s forced to lay so much lower. It’s also hard to even want to experience life when you know your family is all dizzy and exhausted from the trauma of it all.
There’s a verse that my dad has had close to his heart (so its been close to mine) since this all started
Be still and know that I am God.
I was reading this, once again, a few weeks ago after feeling overwhelmed with my own life changes and adjustments, and I looked in the Hebrew of this word “be still”. I was slightly shocked to find that the roots of that word included words like
fail
be faint
be feeble
be idle
let alone
be slack
Um. Excuse me. That’s exactly how I have felt about life over the past few months. And here, with words that have come to be so dear to my heart, I am receiving permission to just be all of these things. It’s so wonderfully freeing when the God of the universe (or some dude who wrote on his behalf) tells you (a perfectionistic tight wad) to just go ahead and be the mess that you are. He can take it. He can handle it.
There is a lot of good news to all this. When life feels like a mess, it’s ok. When major seasons just seem to roll over your numb soul, it’s ok.
Those seasons are going to happen again next year.
There is some relief knowing that even though I’m not experiencing these seasons right now, that lots of people are. And that next year they will too. And perhaps I’ll join in then.
The seasons will come again.
Christmas. Winter. Lent. And Easter.
Side note: little brother is soon getting hitched, so there will be much celebration in Austin, TX in just a few weeks. !!!!!!!!!
