Chaplain's Corner

Well, officially it is still fall, but as we all know, in Manitoba our seasons often don’t march to the precise drumbeat of the calendar. This year fall’s calendar dates run from September 22 – December 20th , but in Manitoba, the first signs of fall often appear quite early in September and even sometimes in late August and by the end of October or early in November winter has already descended upon us.

I don’t know who first thought about life, human life, our lives as having seasons, but it has become quite common to talk of the spring, summer, fall and winter of a person’s life. And as difficult as it is to predict when the seasons will actually show up in our region, it is equally difficult to know just when we move from one season to another in our lives. As I think of my own life I wonder if I’m not in the late summer or maybe even the early autumn of my life.

I would like to ask you to think about your spirituality, your relationship with God using the seasons as a metaphor. As I think about my own spirituality, I can look back over the years and see that I have moved through some seasonal cycles repeatedly and unlike the seasons of the calendar, the seasons of my spiritual life have rather erratic lengths.

A spiritual spring time is a time of rapid and exciting growth. It is a time when there is a freshness in our souls that is invigorating. Our spiritual senses are alive; there is a spiritual fragrance that awakens us to the glory of God, the wonder of his love and grace, and the absolute outrageousness of his willingness to love and forgive. Spiritual spring times are times when we grasp the wonder of both the depths of our unworthiness and the heights of God’s grace. In more traditional spiritual language, the spring times of the soul are experiences like those we go through just following our conversion and times when we experience personal revival or renewal. You can probably think back over your spiritual life and identify a few spring times and hopefully we will all experience a few more.

Summers of the soul are those times of spiritual productivity, spiritual growth and service. Not that you can’t slip into a spiritual winter while serving others, believe me, I have had many spiritual winters during times of service, but giving to others out of the bounty of our spirits is characteristic of the summer times of the soul. The first spiritual summer that I can remember in my life actually happened in the summer of 1969. I just turned 16 years old and I traveled to Soldotna, Alaska for the summer to work on staff at Solid Rick Bible Camp. I signed on to work on the maintenance crew, but before the summer was over I was asked to be the cabin counselor for two weeks working with 8 and 9 year old boys. It was this experience that awakened my soul to the possibility of giving my life to God’s service. I have had many other spiritual summers since then, and I would imagine you have as well.

Spiritual autumns are pleasant times, in my experience the movement from a spiritual summer into a spiritual fall happens almost without knowing it. But eventually the autumns of the soul lead into the coldness of spiritual winter. Spiritual falls are times of enjoying the produce of our spiritual summers. They are times to reflect on the spiritual harvests that we participate in by virtue of the summer times of the soul, by virtue of the times of spiritual productivity, growth and service. But if we take the time to notice, spiritual autumns result in a subtle dying: a dying of dreams, a dying of passions, a dying of motivations. Where once there was a spiritual zeal, in the autumns of the soul there is a deepening passivity, a slowing down, a resting.

The winters of the spirit are generally times of spiritual coldness, productivity stops, our spirits become inert and there is little passion to get moving again. Sometimes in the spiritual winters of our lives we just feel as if we have given and given and given and it’s high time someone else do the giving for a while. Unlike the other-centeredness of spiritual summer, the winters of the soul seem to be more about “me”. There is a self-absorption that overtakes us. Like the seeming deadness of our winters, our souls lie quiet in the deadness of winter and at times we wonder and certainly others wonder if there is any life there at all. But just as in the world there is a need for the seasons, this cycle is in fact part of God’s order. So I believe in the realm of the spiritual all four seasons are part of the cycle, part of the order and that we should not long to remain spiritually in spring and summer all the time.

There is a time and a season for everything isn’t there (Ecclesiastes 3:1). There is a time for spiritual spring time, a time for spiritual summer, a time for spiritual autumn and a time for spiritual winters. Like the more predictable seasons of our natural world, the seasons of our inner world, our spiritual lives likewise call us to relax and trust. Who brings the death of our cold Manitoba winters to the bright, vibrant glory of spring? God does. And who brings the coldness of the human soul back to renewal and hope after a period of spiritual winter time? God does.

As the seasons of the natural order are simply part of the cycle God instituted when he created this world, so are the cycles and seasons of the soul are normal and natural and require that we simply trust God. Our sinful intuition compels us to attempt to create, maintain or overcome these spiritual seasonal changes. But our duty is simply to trust God in the face of these realities. Trusting God is no simple matter, it is the work God calls our souls to do, to simply trust God.

I know the discomfort that can be created by these spiritual seasons, but I also know, from dreadful and futile experience, that working to control these matters is nothing short of blind arrogance and ultimately futile. Even a dogged commitment to do all the right spiritual things (prayer. Scripture reading, worship, service, etc) does not insure that we can control these spiritual seasons and these certainly do not give us the power to avoid the winters of the soul. Often right smack in the midst of a time of fruitful service we find a spiritual winter descending upon us that we are helpless to stop. And just as mysteriously out of the frigidity of our spiritual winters erupt a warmth and freshness that is absolutely unbelievable, short of the work of the Almighty himself.

The longer I live in relationship with God, the more I trust the Living Christ with my life, the more I yield to the Spirit the more I come to understand that my being in control is not the issue at all. Instead I am learning that trust enables me to stay in the flow of God’s movements and purposes and workings in my life. Yielding to Him does not produce predictable results, much to the contrary; yielding to God often moves our lives in mysterious ways that defy comprehension.

At one time I believed that I could control my spiritual path and my progress along that path by simply doing all the right things (this is legalism). Now I believe that it is my lust for control that God is asking me to forfeit so that I can fully trust Him and the sovereign, loving and mysterious control that he alone has the right to. It is in this flow that the seasons of the soul come and go and in each we can learn new and necessary things that will help us love the Lord with all our hearts. In a way, this may be what some mean when they say, let go and let God. Blessings!