I live in North Florida, so I don’t really have winter anymore. But I grew up in Detroit and lived in Ohio, which I hope has earned me street (or snow) cred on this topic. There is a lot of wisdom to be garnered through winter survival. From my experience, March is the worst month because it’s when winter never seems like it’s going to end. February sucks, but March is unbearable. March is like life: some warm days, but when it snows again, it feels like the world is never going to improve, not ever.
Okay, so I’m writing for a friend again. A different friend than last time. She’s living in South Florida but going through what I would call a “spiritual winter.” It’s a time of doubt. Brian McLaren would call it a time of “perplexity”.* She’s waiting for life to turn a page, for things to get better because right now they are cold and horrible. As I responded to her thoughts through an email, I got to reflect a bit on my own reaction to the spiritual winters that I’ve endured. I think I am more in a spiritual spring these days (spring with a cold and rainy day here and there), but my latest spiritual winter is close enough behind me that I can still some patches of snow on the ground.
I would define a spiritual winter as a time when everything with God is more complicated, a time when I have more questions than answers, and a time when I’m more prone to depression.
During literal winter:
1. It gets cold, which means we have to bundle up more or we’ll freeze to death.
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2. There are less colors; the sky is mostly gray so it’s depressing. To get through literal real winter, I had to buy fresh flowers, put out more colorful tablecloths, listen to more upbeat music or I would turn into a dead person.
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3. It snows, which slows everything down. It takes twice as long to get anywhere. We have to clean the car off, warm it up before we can pull out of the driveway, and we can’t drive as fast or we will crash and spin and possibly fall into a ditch.
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I’ve had some spiritual winters (2001-2004 and one I’m getting out of now 2008-2013.). I can look back at them now as times when I learned a lot, and times when not everything was bad, actually, I had a lot of happy times in those winters. But I did have to deal with a lot of cold and snow. This translates to becoming more aware of the sorts of thoughts that “work” and the thoughts that “don’t work,” which come through a lot of reflection. Spiritually, dealing with winter looked like this for me:
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1. Bundling up
Surrounding myself with things that warm me up, avoiding things that made me feel cold. I had to eat less ice cream in the winter, or if I did eat ice cream, I had to eat it by a heater. Ice cream might be the equivalent to anything that could potentially lower my self esteem or make me feel worse about myself if I had too much of it. I had to be extra careful about who I talked to during winter because depression was always a thought and a half away. I had to learn how to devote my time to things that were good for me. I didn’t always do this, of course. I bundled up by going through the Artist’s Way, attending a good bible study and church, listening to sermons online, playing music, eating better, etc.
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2. Add color
This translates to working on my perspective via listening to inspirational sermons online, reading good books, getting fellowship. If the world wasn’t giving me things to delight in, I had to go out and find things.
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3. Deal with the Snow
For me, this meant taking time out to journal, meditate, pray. It meant slowing down. I didn’t always slow down and I crashed a helluva lot during my winters, but when I was aware of the snow, I did a lot better.
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*Mars Hill Church in West Michigan is going through McLaren’s book as a sermon series. I recommend the series and the book. This week’s sermon contributed a lot to my thinking about L’s situation as a seasonal thing.
walk through the sea 