University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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Bob tells me it’s been a little chilly here. I have to laugh. Where I come from, it’s been in single digits for a week. Aside from a few unusually balmy days in November, it’s been brisk in Chicago for months.

Garrison Keillor, one of my favorite theologians, understands the vigor such hardships produce in us hardy Midwesterners. Describing life in his beloved Lake Wobegon, he knows that winter comes early and stays late. He also knows that winter brings an odd relief of its own.

“A hard frost hits in September, sometimes as early as Labor Day,” he writes.

“A hard frost hits in September, and kills the tomatoes that we, being frugal, protected with straw and paper tents, which we, being sick of tomatoes, left some holes in. The milkweed pods turn brown and we crack them open to let the little seeds float out across the garden on their wings of silvery hair. Toward the end of September, the field corn is ready to be picked.

“One Saturday in October, Mayor Clint Bunsen puts up his storm windows, and the next Saturday everyone does, including Byron Tollefson and his boy Johnny, home from college, who asks, ‘Why do we have to do it today just because everyone else is?’

“It was chilly the next night, and the night after that. [October stayed cold; soon enough it was Halloween, and on its heels, November.] A big storm blew in on a Wednesday, a storm that nobody saw coming, not even Bud who knows weather like my father knows the Great Northern and calls the storms as they roll in from the Coast.

“Freezing rain fell in the morning, turning to heavy snow, and by suppertime we had thirteen inches on the ground and more coming, falling sideways in front of a stiff west wind, and you couldn’t see the house across the street. ... This [storm] caught Bud leaning toward autumn.”[i]

Seasons. Winter, freezing cold, the wind sharp and hard and bracing. Spring, its flowers and translucent leaves unfurling before your eyes.  Summer, hot and lush, with humidity so high you could drink it.  Fall, extravagant colors painted against the bright blue sky.  And then it’s winter once again.

Seasons. We know when they’re coming, and only fools pay no attention to them.

At the dawn of another New Year, I’m keenly aware that just as surely as the seasons of the year roll by, so do the seasons of our lives. Childhood. Youth. Adulthood. Old age. “To everything there is a season,” says the Scripture, “and a time to every purpose under heaven.” As surely as each season of the year has its predictability and purpose, so does each changing season of our lives.

Those of us who are parents see it most obviously. In the beginning, as parents of infants, we are utterly clueless, and just when we figure out how to be nurturing and available, we become parents of toddlers who want to do everything themselves.  God help us when we become parents of adolescents and we can’t do anything right! Just when we master the requirements of one stage, another stage brings it own new demands.

But it’s not just parents; all of us feel the shifting nature of our purpose over time.  Over the course of our decades we may be called first to be a student and then a professional; a parent and then the caretaker of our own parents; a spouse, and then suddenly widowed. At one point in our lives we may be called to be a leader in our work or volunteer or social circles, and at another point be called to live in near obscurity. In one chapter we may lead wildly busy lives, with no chance to relax or rest; in another we may find ourselves restless and searching, with more time on our hands than we know what to do with.

The changing of life’s seasons is not easy. It requires us to alter much of what we do; it challenges our image of ourselves, it changes the nature of our usefulness and purpose. It means giving up things that had been meaningful: the dependence of childhood is exchanged for the freedom of youth; the freedom of youth for the responsibility of adulthood; the responsibility of adulthood for both the freedom and the losses brought with age.

Nevertheless, as hard as change is, it comes, as inevitably as this winter will eventually melt into spring. The only season of our lives that we are ever called to be in is the one we’re living now. The question is, will we be faithful in it?

Eighteen years ago, my husband, our infant daughter and I moved from downtown Chicago to Portland, Oregon - and I got caught leaning into the wrong season. All my life I had prepared for my career. I grew up in the church, majored in religion at University of Illinois, earned my Masters of Divinity at Yale, and spent a year on internship – learning everything I know from Jon Walton, whom you will hear next week. After graduation, I served a church in Ohio, then, before I was 30 years old, became an associate pastor at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, a large and prestigious church. I loved my work, and my ministry was succeeding beyond my wildest dreams. While I was at Fourth Church, and caught up in that absurdly busy place, I managed to find time to get married -—- a little older than I’d hoped, but still, “in time” --- and then, a year later, we had our baby. That’s when we decided to make the move to Portland for my husband John’s career.

And suddenly, my life changed completely. I didn’t know a soul in Oregon, my husband was working 24/7, and I was at home alone with a baby. Now, I had chosen this change, but I was still caught unprepared. My career had disappeared, and with it, the only purpose I had ever known. I had no sense of myself. No one to tell me what a great job I had done. No public acclamation. No inspiring sense of making a difference. Just the ceaseless routine of feedings, diapers, laundry, naps, over and over and over again.

Then, ever so slowly, it began to dawn on me. This was my life now. It may have utterly no relationship with my prior identity, my Brooks Brothers suit life, but it was my life anyway. This was it. And slowly, ever so slowly, I began to invest in it. Not just our baby, whom I’d always loved, but our life, my life, this new and utterly foreign existence, this new self. I was, in fact, the same person. I still had my intellect, my aspirations, my talents, my dreams. And someday, I might get to them again; or I might not. I didn’t know. What I did know was that for now, for this season, this is what I was called to do. Being at home, being in solitude, being a mother of a small, dependent child, this was my purpose, for however long this season of my life would last. And I loved it as I had never loved a season of my life before.

My life has changed again since then. When our daughter Annie entered grade school, I went back to work full-time. Now she’s a sophomore at University of Chicago; and I know she still needs me, though in a completely different way. I’m enjoying my work – it’s work I love - and it is another season of my life, another very happy one, and I am hoping it will last a good long time. But I am so very glad I leaned into the season of young motherhood when I was in it. For little did I know then that I would only have one chance at it, that it would be such a very, very short season.

I was caught leaning into the season I had left; I was unprepared for the new season when it came. But sometimes we find ourselves leaning into the next season of our lives too soon, too early. A friend of mine back in Portland has been watching her elderly husband’s slow decline in health for some time now; his condition is undoubtedly terminal. But for years all she was able to focus on was his dying. Her mind couldn’t concentrate; her work had suffered; her heart was so heavy with grief she could not experience joy.

But then something changed. It is as if she woke up one morning and realized that she had been leaning into the wrong season. She had been living in the season of her husband’s death when she was still, in fact, in the season of her husband’s living. This shift has made all the difference in the world. It is as if she is living in her own life again, living in the present, instead of trying to live in a season that had not quite yet arrived. This season, the present time, is not a season of death but a season of life, a season in which she still has important work to do, and friends to visit, and most of all, a husband, her husband, to tend and to enjoy as long as he is here.

There will always be temptations to live leaning into the wrong season - behind or ahead of the one in which we live. Sometimes the temptation comes from within, from the resistance to give up what we’re familiar with, or the urgency to get on with whatever’s coming next. And sometimes the temptation comes from outside, from others who want to hold us back or push us forward. Even Jesus himself was not immune from such pressures. Time after time in the gospels, the crowds try to tie him down, to have him stay with them, to heal and teach and bless their lives. It must have been tempting to Jesus - to linger where he was valued and listened to and given all the authority his wisdom had deserved. But today, Epiphany, is the last time we see him settled in one place. Next week when we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord we mark the day his ministry was launched – the day that Jesus’ season of a settled life was over. From then on it would be time for him to move on - to teach and heal throughout the countryside, to confront the power of evil in the world, to share the good news of God’s shalom, even with those who would soon become his enemies. Jesus would not be held back from the struggle and effort and purpose of this season of his life - even when it ultimately led to the season of his death.

It’s New Year’s now, and winter is upon us. The nights are cold, the days are brisk, and in Chicago white snow will blanket the ground for months to come. Here spring will come sooner – the buds of leaves will start to show, the early flowers will bloom, and the breeze will catch the sweet, musky smells of new life and summer will be here before you know it, with high humidity to match the temperature. But until then, let us enjoy the season that we have.

What season is it for you, in your own life? A season of busyness, of work or of children, of schedules and relentless meetings? Or is it instead a season of life’s tempering, of slowing down and savoring the freedom of time?

As surely as the winter comes every year, and soon the spring, so do the seasons of our lives unfold. Some are easier to take than others, some we welcome and some we dread. The truth is that each brings its own challenges, its peculiar brokenness and struggle. And each brings its own hope, its own energy, its opportunity for God to make all things new. The seasons come regardless, and the question really is, will we be faithful to our purpose in this season of our lives? I believe God has a purpose for our lives - not just in general but in particular, right here, right now, in the only season that is ours to live today.

Jesus said, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own” (Mt. 6:34) . Writer Frederick Buechner put it this way:

“‘This is the day which the Lord has made, ‘ says the 118th Psalm. ‘Let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ Or weep and be sad in it for that matter. The point is to see [this season] for what it is because it will be gone before you know it. If you waste it, it is your life that you’re wasting.”[ii]

And if you live in it, lean into it, whatever season this may be, you will find God’s presence with you too: with hope and joy and courage for the struggle, for however long this season lasts.

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to reap. a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.” 

For God has made everything beautiful, beautiful in its own time. Amen.