Good morning…
This week in class, we read aloud these words from the prologue of our book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May.
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Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in your life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or a birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds… However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet it’s also inevitable. (p. 10-11)
We put on a brave public face and grieve privately; we pretend not to see other people’s pain. We treat wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored. This means we’ve made a secret of an entirely ordinary process and have thereby given those who endure it a pariah status, forcing them to drop out of everyday life in order to conceal their failure. Yet we do this at a great cost. Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.
In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t even dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us. An occasional sharp wintering would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how. (p. 12-13)
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To understand how we can choose to winter, I jump now to another book I absolutely love, Choose Joy: Because Happiness Isn’t Enough by Kay Warren.
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…the bottom line: Joy is a choice. (p.22)
…Joy is the settled assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet confidence that ultimately everything is going to be alright, and the determined choice to praise God in all things. Did you catch that? Joy is a settled conviction ABOUT God. It’s a quiet confidence IN God. And joy is a determined choice to give my praise TO God. (p. 32)
When I say, “Everything will be all right,” it’s not the equivalent of saying, “Don’t worry, be happy” or some other nifty little phrase. Believing that ultimately everything is going to be all right takes into account car accidents, cancer, bankruptcy, miscarriage, depression, and every other grief we face. Choosing to believe that God is always working, knitting together the fragments of our live, always in control of it all, means that life will work together for our good and his glory. (p. 33)
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We are confident that God is able to orchestrate everything to work toward something good and beautiful when we love Him and accept His invitation to live according to His plan (Romans 8:28, VOICE).
As wild winter weather blankets much our country this weekend, will we accept God’s invitation to choose joy in all things?
…Sue…
P.S. This Wednesday, January 28th from 6:00 to 8:00 pm in room 300 at Northside Church, I will facilitate an interactive discussion of our favorite quotes from Kay Warren’s book Choose Joy. If you want to be added to our roster, please reply to this email and share with me your name, number, and email address. In addition, Kay Warren will be speaking at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church at 5:00 pm on Sunday, February 1st. Sign up here for this special, complimentary evening.
