How to Overcome the Dark Days: The Winter Seasons of Life → A More Beautiful Life Collective

1 Shares

In this post, we talk about the causes and responses to the Winter Seasons of life. These are seasons where we feel far from God and full of doubt. They may be caused by circumstances outside of our control or our own past failings. We have two responses: (1) Lean into God or (2) Turn away from him. This post will guide you towards leaning into God during those winter seasons by preparing and weathering that season well.

S2E16 – 5 Christmas Traditions all about books and reading – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

With Christmas right around the corner, we want to make sure we are building traditions that help us to tell the story of the gospel and build a strong family culture. Advent is the perfect time for learning, making memories, and having fun! And, what better way to connect with our loved ones than through books? Listen if for 5 Christmas Traditions all about books and reading. Read more at the blog post: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/5-christmas-traditions-all-about-books-reading/ Get a FREE Advent Study guide here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/the-everlasting-joy-of-the-gospel-advent-bible-study/ Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Hello everyone! Welcome to A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. I’m your host Cayce Fletcher, and this is S1E25 of the podcast. We are starting a new series today on how to weather the winter seasons of life well, and I would love to hear your thoughts. You can leave me a comment on YouTube or leave a 1-2 sentence review wherever you listen to podcasts.

***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***

Seasons of Life

Winter light “hits different.” When we are in the midst of winter, we may forget the vibrant hues of summer sun and how truly bright the world can be. In the winter, everything feels slightly flat, just a little more gray, a little washed-out.

I wonder how people dealt with the winter in the past. I was just listening to a Podcast that described how – before electric lights were made popular in the 1800’s – everyone just went to bed when it got dark, maybe chatting around the hearth for a few minutes. With the advent of artificial, we flip-flopped our days and nights. We try to darken the days by staying inside but lighten up the nights with screens and lights switch on.

I feel deeply that God created a pattern for our world, a certain order that our lives should follow. This cyclical schedule occurs in our days, weeks, and years. But, we also have a cyclical schedule implicit in the seasons of our lives. They mimic the change of the seasons of the year.

Winter: A time of suffering, sadness, and quietness, a resting time, A Wilderness
Spring: New Growth, Opportunities, “A Waking Up” to the Work We Must Do
Summer: A time for work, joy, and gladness
Fall: A return to quietness and rest, A season of change

What season do you feel like you are in? It’s helpful to be aware of our seasons because we want to have the right response to the moment that we are in.

We all experience Winter Seasons of Life

I’m currently reading Becoming Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn, and through the up’s and down’s of Elisabeth Elliot’s life, you can sense this change from season to season. Elisabeth Elliot, married to Jim Elliot, dedicated her life to God’s service and that meant missionary work. Her husband was murdered trying to take the Gospel to the Woadani, a homicidal tribe deep in the Ecuadorian forest.

Elisabeth Elliot was no stranger to suffering or to those winter seasons.

She had two options after her husband’s death. In this winter season, she could (1) abandon God and the jungle people she felt called to OR (2) continue to trust in God and minister to these people.

After her husband’s death, she did not leave the jungle. She continued to minister to the jungle tribes while working on a book chronicling her husband’s life and death and while working tirelessly to try to translate the Bible into the Woadani language. She deeply desired to go and minister to the people who killed her husband, and ultimately, she did.

In our podcast on how to make your goals and dreams, we talked about the long and winding road that success really is. We like to think that it happens quickly. That if something is a moral good in the world, God will bring it to come to pass with little effort on our part. But, Elisabeth Elliot realized that this is not the case.

She agonized over decisions and (what seemed to her ) unanswered prayers. For months, she prayed to go to the Woadani, but it seemed like her prayers fell on deaf ears.

But, God sees, and God knows. One day, two women from the Woadani tribe showed up by Elisabeth Elliot and stayed with her for months. Eventually, they took her back to her people so that she could begin to minister to the Woadani, a tribe who had never heard the gospel.

We also must choose our response to these winter seasons of life.

A Physical Response to Those Winter Seasons

We’ve been focused on getting things done from a godly perspective for the past month on the podcast. Today, we are starting a new series that is the foundation for how to stay faithful. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that I wholeheartedly believe that we are called to work for the good of God’s kingdom. That should be one of our central goals in our lives.

But, I found myself returning again and again to this question: What do we do when we just don’t feel like it?

That seems like a selfish question, right? But, we all can identify with this.

Sometimes, we are in our summer season of life. We are ready to work and hustle and accomplish and check off our to-do lists. We want to set goals and be productive.

At other times, it’s a struggle to just maintain the status quo. We feel listless. We feel tired. We feel burnt out. We don’t want to keep up our daily habits, much less go out and conquer the world for God.

So, what do we do then?

I call these moments ‘Winter Seasons.’ It’s commonly known that in the winter, people experience Seasonal Affective Disorder, aptly shortened as S.A.D. This occurs especially as you go further and further north, where you get less and less sunshine and light. S.A.D. occurs because of a change in our circadian rhythm and serotonin and melatonin levels.

Some of the symptoms of this disorder include:

Feeling listless, sad or down most of the day, nearly every day
Losing interest in activities you once enjoyed
Having low energy and feeling sluggish
Having problems with sleeping too much
Experiencing carbohydrate cravings, overeating and weight gain
Having difficulty concentrating
Feeling hopeless, worthless or guilty
Having thoughts of not wanting to live

*From Mayo Clinic, “Seasonal Affective Disorder”

The symptoms of S.A.D. mimic those of depression. Winter can literally make us feel sad. I have experienced this myself in the past month, in between sickness and bad weather. We begin to hear over and over again how in January and February, you just have to ‘stick it out’ and ‘take breaks when you need them.’ I think we all have felt that strain and yearning for summer sometime in the deep of winter.

Visit A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop for bible studies, planners, and other resources.

Visit Shop

What are those winter seasons of life?

Our bodies have a response to literal winter, and I also believe that we have a spiritual and emotional response to those winter seasons in our faith.

You may be in a winter season if you are in:

A period of difficult suffering
A time of doubting
A time of spiritual warfare
A busy, dry spell in your faith
A time of change and turmoil
A time of loneliness
A sin-shame spiral

Sometimes, the winter seasons of our faith match up with the literal seasons. I’ve often found that life gets busy in January and February after the holidays. Busyness of life means less time for connection with God and others. This often leads to loneliness and listlessness: A Winter Season.

Or it can be a shorter or longer period, stretching from days to years. If you go through a time of suffering or doubt, due to self-made circumstances or things outside of your control, you may be going through a winter season.

A winter season of your life is characterized by:

Lack of purpose, rudderless
Lack of action, listlessness
Lack of connection, loneliness
Lack of joy, sadness
Lack of confidence, hopelessness

In the winter seasons, we struggle with feelings of lack. Like the barren trees of physical winter, we also experience a barrenness. In winter seasons, we may feel like there is a lack of fruit in our lives. We don’t see much productive work happening.

The barrenness of winter is actually misleading. God created a certain order in creation for a reason. I believe that day and night and the seasons were all created by God for a reason.

Some of the benefits of physical winter are:

A period to grow roots: In winter, plants are forced to shoot their roots down into the ground to get nutrients. Trees will actually spend their energy on root growth in the winter.
A period to be hardened: Perennial plants are ‘hardened’ during the winter. They actually create a coating that protects itself like antifreeze.
A period to produce new fruit: In the last days of fall, seeds are being spread from plants that die back in the wintertime. The seeds from the fruit lie waiting throughout the winter for the upcoming spring.

I could mention other physical things that we get from winter, like maple syrup from trees or cold-weather crops like Rye.

In all of these instances, it seems like winter is just a period of barrenness characterized by a lack of growth, but really, if you look under the surface, you see more happening than you think.

2 Responses to a Winter Seasons of Life

A plant or tree has two responses to a winter season:

It can weather the winter.
Or it can die.

Similarly, your faith has to respond to the winter season of life:

Your faith can weather the winter.
Or your faith can die.

Elisabeth Elliot dealt with doubt and questioning, but she held fast to the calling that she had received. Her faith consequently weathered the storm of that winter season. That season did change after a time, and she reaped 10, 30, 100 times the fruit that she had sown.

We have to choose what our response will be to our winter seasons. I pray that your response will be to weather the winter and to hold fast.

Preparing for the Winter Seasons of Life

Often, we don’t really think about how our seasons of life can change, ebb, and flow until it has already happened. Preparing before the winter seasons of life occur will help you to weather the winter seasons of your life so much better.

1. Store up nutrients before the winter.

Plants store up nutrients in their roots that they use to survive in the winter. Similarly, you need to store up truth beforehand to survive your winter seasons of life. When you have truth saved up in your mind, you will be able to draw from that storehouse when hard times come.

How do you store up truth? You have to be dedicated to spending time with God and searching the scriptures. Read your bible every day, and make a habit to memorize bible verses. Write down prayers that you can recite. Surround yourself with examples of people who inspire you to live for God. Listen to voices that draw you closer to God.

2. Harden and steel yourself as you prepare for winter.

Like the trees that guard their leaves with anti-freeze, you also need to harden yourself for the trials of life. To do this, you need to spend time in prayer, asking God to ready you for those spiritual battles. You can also begin to search out what you believe about God. You do this not to deconstruct your beliefs, but to make them stronger. You should work out your own beliefs with fear and trembling, making sure to have an answer for every truth. If you don’t know what you believe, then those beliefs will never last you through a long winter.

Weathering the Winter Seasons of Life

Once winter begins, the season of preparation is over. If you are in the winter seasons of life now, there are a few things you can do to weather that season and come out at the end of it with a stronger faith.

1. Send your roots deep.

Our biblical roots are the core tenets of our faith. In the winter seasons of life, you should focus on sending those roots deep. Think about the core beliefs you have: Who God is, Who Jesus is, What the gospel is, What our hope is. Those are the beliefs that you need to cling to.

What does it mean to cling to something? When you cling to it, you hold fast to it. I imagine being lost at sea, holding on to a barrel or a log while the waves toss and turn you. Or an experience more of you have probably had, holding fast to an innertube as someone turns the boat this way and that trying to sling you off. You are clinging to the thing that is your salvation, your lifeline.

When you hold fast to that thing, you are focused on it only. You are not looking to the right or the left. You are desiring for that one thing. Unlike Peter, who looked at the wind and the waves, to cling to a lifeline means you can’t focus on fear, you can only focus on the truth that you know to be the case.

To send your roots deep, you can focus on those key tenets of your faith and apply them deeply to your life.

2. Rest and Recover

Though plants don’t necessarily need rest like we do, the soil does. The winter season allows for a period of rest and renewal of the soil. The old material on the soil – think leaves and other plant decay – starts to decompose returning the nutrients back to the soil. If you are a gardener or homesteader, you know the importance of having those nutrients in the soil. Good compost – including manure – is gold!

As you focus on your key tenets, you might find that you feel more energized in your faith. You may desire and trust God more. The winter seasons in your life help to give wisdom and lived experience to the head knowledge that you acquire in your study of the Bible. The testing of your faith develops that perseverance.

3. Hope for spring and the growth of new life.

This may seem counterintuitive. When we consider the winter seasons of life, it seems like we should focus on a lack of productivity, a season of rest. To a certain extent, this is true. But winter can also become a season that provides for the new growth of Spring as we’ve seen. Seed is spring in the fall and winter and comes to its resting place there as it prepares for spring. Many seeds take a while to germinate as the ground slowly heats back up.

Similarly, we often don’t recognize the way that the seeds we are spreading start to grow… or the seeds that are spread in us. We hope for spring and the new growth that it brings, trusting that God will bring it to fruition. It may seem hopeless in the winter, but that is why we have faith. We trust in things not seen. We trust that God is working even when we can’t see it.

A New Attitude for the Winter Seasons of Life

Weathering the winter seasons well means that our attitude necessarily changes.

When you deal rightly with a winter season, you will change how winter seasons affect you.

We move from having a lack of purpose to being reminded of God’s plan, from rudderless to focused.
We move from having a lack of action to acting strategically, from listlessness to wise action.
We move from having a lack of connection to embracing others, from loneliness to restful companionship.
We move from having a lack of joy to joy despite our circumstances, from sadness to contentment.
We move from having a lack of confidence to being sure of what we hope for, from hopelessness to hopefulness.

When we prepare and weather our winter seasons well, we will end up having a testimony of faith that will inspire others. We will end with a legacy of faith. We will grow in wisdom, faithfulness, and holiness.

How will you overcome your winter seasons?

Now it’s your turn: How to Handle the Dark Days of Winter

Let’s Recap:

Winter seasons of life are times of spiritual depression, doubt, and loneliness. There can be times when we feel far from God. When we go through these times, we have two options: To turn from God or turn towards God. We should all desire to turn towards God.

To overcome these seasons – and turn towards God, we need to prepare for the winter seasons – storing up goodness and truth, and then we need to weather the winter seasons, being rooted in truth and hardening ourselves in spiritual battles.

I would love to hear your thoughts! You can leave a comment below if you are watching on YouTube to tell me what you thought or you can leave a few sentences as a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever you listen to podcasts.

Head on over to Facebook or Instagram to follow along with me. You can find me @amorebeautifullifecollective

Until next time, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.

Pin1

1 Shares