You Are Not Backslidden. You Are in Winter

Somebody taught you that closeness has one correct temperature and that any drop in it is your fault. So when the fire went quiet you started auditing yourself for the sin that caused it, and you have been auditing ever since, and the auditing is now most of what your faith consists of.

Let me tell you what I have seen in forty years of walking with people. Seasons are not discipline. They are seasons.

There is a spring where everything is new and you cannot stop talking about it. There is a summer where you are producing and it is visible and people can see the fruit on you. There is an autumn where things you built come in, and some of it is harvest and some of it is loss, and both arrive in the same month. And there is a winter where nothing is happening above the ground at all.

Winter is not punishment. Winter is when the root goes down, and it is the only time the root goes down, and a tree that never had a winter is a tree you should not stand under in a storm.

I am the joy one. Everybody knows that about me. So hear it from me specifically: I have had winters where I felt nothing for eleven months and I was not far away, I was underground, and what came up afterwards had a depth in it that no summer ever gave me.

The mistake is not being in winter. The mistake is treating winter like a failed summer and exhausting yourself trying to force a bloom in January.

You are somewhere in a cycle, and knowing which part changes what you should be doing. Almost nobody knows which part they are in.