Seasons of Life

A couple weeks ago, on yet another sunny day in the high 70s, I was in a meeting where someone responded to the icebreaker question, "What's one thing you're looking forward to this month?" with the answer, "I'm looking forward to just one crisp fall morning." The joke was on her, I guess. The next day, it was 46 degrees when I woke up... although the temperature was back in the 80s soon enough.

It's beginning to get a bit spooky. And I'm not talking about the approach of Halloween—although that only amplifies the effect. It feels unnatural to see pumpkins and ghosts appearing on the streets when it feels like you should be at the beach. There's a sense of faint unease that comes when things don't quite match up with each other: when the leaves are beginning to change, and the air is downright tropical.

This is often the case in our lives, as well. Except on rare occasions of national celebration or natural disaster, we're rarely all going through the same thing at the same time. On any given day, some of us are celebrating good news, some dealing with bad news. Some of us are welcoming new children into our lives, and some are grieving parents who have passed. Some of us are recovering from a surgery or long illness, and some are encountering new limits in what we can do. It can feel isolating, or even alienating, to be going through an intense experience alone, while the people around you go about their days. It can be a bit awkward when things are good (how many of us really want to respond to "How's it going?" with "You know what, I'm actually doing amazingly well right now and let me tell you why..."); the isolation is much worse when things are hard, and it feels like you're going through them alone.

It's one of the reasons I find the image of "seasons" of life useful, even if it's become a bit of a cliché. Seasons change. In fact, that’s the only thing they’re guaranteed to do. If the weather forecast holds, I'm writing this on a warm summer day and you're reading it on a crisp fall one. While summer heat may seem to last forever, it will eventually end; soon, winter will seem endless, and that too will pass. We go through many seasons of life, and those seasons keep changing.

And most importantly: we go through many seasons of life, all of us. While we sometimes seem to live in separate hemispheres, experiencing wildly different things in life at the same time, all of us pass through similar seasons. The details of our stories are never exactly the same. But so much of our experience is shared.

From my perspective, that’s one of the greatest gifts of the church. Many of us spend much of our time with people who are more or less at similar stages of life—students spend time with students, people at work spend time with other working people, new parents spend time with other new parents, and so on. But the church is full of people who have experienced all of these things, in different ways, at different times. And if you find yourself sitting in the pew, thinking that you’re alone in what you’re going through, you might be surprised how many people around you have gone through similar things—perhaps not identical in details, but enough to understand, and to listen with compassion and care.

Amid all the changing seasons of life, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses: people who have gone through the same things before, and come out the other side. I’ve been so grateful to have some of these connections in my life, over the last few years; and it fills me with joy to see them happen for other people. There’s a hidden blessing in the fact that the seasons of our lives don’t quite sync up with one another: Whenever you are weak, there are people around you who are strong enough to help support you at that moment, and who know what it is to go through a season you need help to endure.

Autumn comes to Devens Street.