Winter, spring, summer, and fall…through the natural cycle of every season, the Father invites us into soul care and discovery.
Soul care is the daily process of cultivating healthy thought patterns and taking inventory of emotions so that you can walk in obedience and live freely before God while also healthily forming meaningful relationships with other people.
McKenna Von Gunten
All of nature is in agreement and alignment with the needs of the pinnacle of His creation: us.
God created us to function as we do, including our human needs: love, sleep, community, hunger, thirst, play, work.
He values our needs, creating us to be one with Him and perceive His fingerprints in all things. In essence, He formed our needs that we might find ultimate fulfillment in Him and His provision.
What if every season held the potential for new self-understanding and a deepening of our intimacy with the Creator? What if each season could teach us more about our nature as an extension of His?
Winter: The time to rest, burrow, create, dream, and warm our hearts to the reality of His nearness.
Spring: The time to defrost, give birth, come alive in the beauty of unfolding and becoming.
Summer: The time to work, sweat, plow, and play.
Fall: The time to recognize our limits, savor beauty, shed excess, and prepare.
He is a God of kindness and order. The order of all creation is in sync with itself: sunrise, sunset. The sun, trees, water and wind affect and mirror our needs. Fill up, pour out, rest.
How often we reject our limits and needs in lieu of believing the false cultural guise of self-sufficiency. As technology advances, we slowly and unconsciously fall into assumption that our needs are as outdated as the last iPhone model.
Yet nonetheless, the trees lose their leaves and begin again.
Are we above doing the same? Growing, shedding, preparing, daring to do it all over again?
I pose the question: How is the current season inviting you into a specific form of soul care?
For me, winter brings with it the coziness conducive to dreaming and imagination. Books and writing and deep conversations with loved ones spark memories and fresh vision. Indoor cycling classes and baking bread order my body into a rhythm of sweat, rest, and creativity. Long walks with my dog and husband whilst bundled in my favorite winter garb spark a reflectiveness that the heat of summer evaporates.
As seasons come and go, I find myself listening and leaning into need, finding God in all mine, unfolding into aliveness.
He is in it all.
He made the moon to mark the seasons,
Psalm 104: 19, 24, 31-33
and the sun knows when to go down…How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures…May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works—he who looks at the earth, and it trembles, who touches the mountains, and they smoke. I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.”