Cultivating a Spiritual Life: Seasons

The first thing I noticed when I stepped out my front door was the sweet-and-sour scent of freshly mown hay. We live across the road from Mennonite dairy farmers, and as my snatched moments of uninterrupted quiet passed by, another sense was awakened. This time it was my ears perking to the approaching hum of the farmer’s tractor with the rake attached. Our neighbor was turning over the crop to ready it for baling and stacking and storing—a winter feast for his animals.

Life as a rural and small-town pastor’s wife affords many opportunities to see God’s truths displayed in the seasons. Life has seasons, too, and so often our spiritual life has been described by referring to the different seasons of growth we go through as we are conformed to the image of the Son who saved us.

So how do we cultivate our spiritual life no matter what season we are in?  In spring when everything is fresh and new and we feel constant surges of joy? In summer when the days are long and full of sunshine and there is the hope of maturity and full growth? In autumn when the harvest comes and we reap the benefits of our hard labours? And then winter when life seems to die around us, when the days are short and the sunshine sparse?  

I think the key to growth in our spiritual life is not necessarily (gasp!) reading your Bible for longer periods or praying more or fasting more. We certainly need a steady diet of the Word and prayer if we are going to grow, but I have come to learn over the years that I grow in my walk with Christ most when I embrace the season in which God has placed me and submit to God’s will in it. I can know the Bible well and miss spiritual growth if I don’t believe and obey what I read in it.

As women we are well familiar with seasons of life. We have the single years where we have freedom to come and go as we please without family obligations or responsibilities, but we feel lonely and wonder if we’ll ever meet “the right one.” When (if) we get married, we enjoy the honeymoon stage of married life where we feel like we are on top of the world and nothing will be able to stop us or our dreams, but that first miscarriage or that first church business meeting breaks the bubble of the illusion of happiness in marriage and ministry. Then our first child comes along, and we know the joy of nurturing life, but we also know the test of feeling stuck at home and the endless nights of interrupted sleep and endless days of diapers and nose wiping.

It goes on, and we wonder, how is any of this spiritual? I can’t even get a minute to myself to have quiet and peace unless I’m in the washroom! On top of all this, I am a pastor’s wife in a small town where everyone has as many expectations of me as they do of my husband. How am I to be the spiritual leader of these women when they don’t seem to realize how very much I am like them?!

Embrace your current season, dear fellow pastor’s wife. Whatever season we are in, we need to submit to God’s will in it. Are you feeling stuck at home with your little ones and wondering if you will ever be able to use that four-year degree? Rejoice that the Father tends his little ones as a mother ewe cares for her sheep. (Isaiah 40) Are you and your pastor husband facing a dark time with critical spirits in your congregation and division and strife? Remember that our Lord had more enemies than friends (and even they deserted him in the end), and He chose to forgive them. Are you facing the loss of a child to miscarriage or an aging parent to death? Place your hope in the life to come where death has no more power to sting.

Just as the farmer submits to the laws of the land in order to receive the growth of his crop, so we will cultivate a spiritual life when we submit to the season in which we find ourselves, trusting in our Good Father, the Cultivator of all spiritual fruit.

Part 1 of 2
– Part 2: Cultivating a Spiritual Life – Seeking the Lord