Where I am from the winter is cold, snowy, icy, muddy and what you expect of winter. The winter serves its purpose.

If we get a good, cold freeze for a couple of weeks, we have less ticks and bugs. Without the freeze those irritating critters can abound.

It’s also true that in the dormancy of winter the trees get a rest. It’s a season of dormancy from bearing leaves, fruit and more. It’s not that they stop growing, they just are in a different season.

In the winter season, should we pray and expect leaves on the trees and flowers on the ground? Then become angry when God doesn’t answer our prayers? Yet isn’t this what we do sometimes?

It’s true. We want seasons of summer. Seasons of dormancy, and seeming deadness, and long periods of uncomfortable times are not fun. Not that there isn’t beauty in the season. There is. It’s just different. And we are more holed in.

But spring eventually comes. Sometimes we have shorts winter. Sometimes long winters.

With seasons of the soul, these time frames are not so predictable. It could be weeks, months, years or even decades.

We have to guard our hearts though that we don’t expect God to give leaves on the trees in winter and get angry when he doesn’t. I’m guilty of this.

There are different seasons. And in each season God is doing different things. There are seasons of harvest and fruitfulness, seasons of beauty and turbulence, seasons of hot but fun, and seasons of cold and barrenness as well.

Respect the seasons, I must tell myself.

And trust God’s ways are different in each of these seasons.

It’s not good for trees to produce blossoms in winter.