Times of transition can be good and bad.  When one is engrossed in unpleasant circumstances a nice change of pace can be just what the doctor ordered.  It breathes new life into you and lifts your spirits high making you feel as if you are on cloud nine.  At the same time, when one is entering into times of affliction, lack or any sort of substandard anything compared to what they are used to, the feelings of dread and just suffering through take over.

Winter for me is not the best season.  I am seriously beginning to see why people move to warmer climates.  Over the past couple of years winter has taken its toll on me and I grow more and more weary of it with each passing year.  Thank God for deliverance and we are deep in Spring once again.  Days when the trees begin to get green and lush once more; when there is a fresh breeze in the air that causes you to inhale deeply hoping to savor as much of it as you can.

Today, while I was driving I experienced one of those Spring savoring moments.  Riding with the windows down, just running errands and grocery shopping, I couldn’t help but to admire God’s handiwork shown in the changing seasons.  I was silently praising Him that it’s not always winter.  That as long as the earth is here we have these times that transition out of the funky icky blahs of one season into the brilliantly colored warmth of the next.

Life is a lot like those transitioning seasons.  Stages, if you will, that carries you from one level to the next.  Each brings with it certain blahs, and yet each brings the brilliantly colored.  It’s just pushing through the blended, muddled messes to arrive on the other side.

I have on my balcony outside an old multi-colored faded rug that has suffered through many summers and winters.  The wear and tear on it more than shows.  For right now the shades and hues are nowhere near reminiscent of what they used to be.  The muddled colors have to go.  To breathe life back into one of my favorite reading, writing, and relaxing areas I will replace this rug in the very near future.  Its usefulness has held up and endured, but now is time for something different.

That’s what these stages do.  They bring us to something different.  If life were the same all the time; the same shade, the same level, the same, the same season – one may not appreciate it as much.  Someone once said, “There is no rainbow without the rain,” to which I wholeheartedly agree to.

Does it make me like winter any more than I do now?  Nope.  Nor, do I like trying times and circumstances, but when God brings you to a place of deliverance; a place where you can deeply inhale and breathe in the freshness of the season and take in all the new shades that brilliantly light up your life, you appreciate the new level and just thank God for seeing you through another stage of life.