Seasons

We finished putting away the Christmas things today, and tonight with my pizza I finished the holiday apple cider. It was a special Christmas, a fairly quiet one, but that’s not at all bad. I’m not sure why, but this year we didn’t get through our Christmas-music CDs like we have other years. As we worked on the dismantling, we commented that sometime it is more work to put the Christmas things away than it was to get them out. True or not, putting Christmas away is always a bit melancholy for me. I’m glad our outdoor lights are still on outside my office window tonight, but this may be the last night for them as well.

I find interesting the way we measure “seasons” by different things. Besides the obvious ones of spring, summer, fall, and winter, there is childhood, puberty, parenthood, grandparenthood, retirement. Much of my life organizes by geography—Africa (childhood), Florida (boarding school), Wheaton (college), Michigan (school for hubby), Wheaton again (building a family), South America and Texas (mission work), and now Tennessee.

Another way to look at the seasons of my life is what I’ve been doing through the years—teaching, mothering, more teaching, writing curriculum, coordinating publications, and the last eleven years training and consulting.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, I can pars out the seasons of Tangled Strands in my life as well, some of them paralleling phases mentioned above. Creating the characters (young mother), writing the back story (South America), studying writing in a vacuum (pub-coordinator), and more recently studying writing in community with other writers and bringing the story up to standards of Christian fiction today.

Will there be a season of marketing, book signings, and reviews—both glowing and glaring? Only God knows, of course, but I haven’t given up on the possibility. Meanwhile, I’ll accept and align myself with the new season that is upon me—post-Christmas, new year, whatever you want to call it. The God who has seen me through all the others will see me through the next one.

In fact, who knows what exciting season He may know lies ahead?