One Word
This winter on The Daily Pattern we’re in a series called One Word. Each day we take one word – a feeling or circumstance – and bring a word from God to it. Let the Word of God speak to your life.
Invocation
Make the sign of the cross, and say,
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Invitation Prayer
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matt. 5:4) O Lord, I suffer grief and loss. You alone are my comfort. Amen.
Word: Ecclesiastes 3:9-12
“What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”
Meditation
Blah by Megan Roegner
In the book Wintering author Katherine May shows the parallels between surviving cold months and periods of duress. In both kinds of seasons, May observes, people endure not by resisting literal or spiritual winter but through accepting it and finding different, often slower and more comforting, rhythms. May writes,
Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes—lays on fat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey—and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn’t do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans.
As we settle into the bleak and tedious months of January and February, I feel the return of my own internal winter, a feeling that can best be described as blah. Always at this point of the year, normal routines and activities seem too hard, too bright, too loud, too meaningless. I want the solitude of my house; I want to huddle under a blanket reading books and drinking vast quantities of hot beverages.
Katherine May would probably say that’s exactly what I should do. Instead of feeling guilty or ashamed of my desire to retreat, she would tell me to embrace it and seek the unique and gentle consolations of winter.
Reading Wintering made me think of Ecclesiastes, whose author seems to be extremely familiar with feelings of blah and spiritual winter. “All is vanity. … All things are full of weariness,” he laments in the first chapter. He considers all of his “toil under the sun” and struggles to find a purpose for it. And yet, in chapter three, we see that in his vast wisdom, he’s able to accept that “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (3:1), including times of blah. In verse 11, he reflects that “everything is beautiful in its time.” In verse 13 he advises us “that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”
Perhaps we need to be patient with ourselves when we feel mired in blah. To allow ourselves to rest and retreat with no shame. To accept a time of winter as having its own kind of toil and to find God’s gifts in the different kinds of pleasure it offers, even if they are as humble as mugs of tea and a warm blanket.
Lord, you are with us all the time, in times of joy, times of sadness, and times of blah. Let us feel your presence in every season. Give us strength to endure. Thank you for all of your gifts. Amen.
Prayer for Life as a Child of God
· For the Father to give me care and guidance.
· For forgiveness when I wander and want my own way.
· For the Father to keep me childlike in faith even as I age.
· For growth in faith, that I love and trust in God above all things.
· For strength to obey God.
· For the Father to heal my hurts.
· For assurance when I doubt.
Closing Prayer
O Lord, your ways are not our ways. Teach us your will, even when it appears backwards. We want to know you. We want what you want. Thy will be done, in Jesus’ name. Amen.