Stop Squeezing the Cat: To everything there is a season...

There is something bittersweet to me about autumn.

The beautiful colors, the relief the cool weather brings to our sunburned skin. I love it. It is soothing and lovely. But I also have this underlying anxiety. There is something about this time of year that has me hoarding in all the outside time we can get. I anticipate the coming cold winter. We are going to have to say our temporary good byes to bike rides, swinging, walking to feed Ginger (the neighbors' horse). I desperately want to take in all we can. I desperately want to clear my calendar for the upcoming months of holidays that are bound to be maddening. And I am wanting to simplify. I prefer to spring clean in the fall. To purge the house of the sickening amount of junk and grime that have collected during the busy spring and summer. I guess I'm preparing. Preparing for the long months ahead.

Winter is by far my least favorite season. Being stuck inside the house with 4 energetic yahoos can wear my feeble emotional state thin at times. And I'm not one of those creative moms that just happen to have everything on hand for the kids to whip out a bird feeder. I don't have a 'craft box' for the kids to go make some project. I might have a 1984 shoebox filled with broken crayons with no wrappers.

This October marks a one year anniversary of a milestone year for me personally. Starting in October of 2010 I entered into a year that was defined by loss. We lost both our dogs and several cats this year. To some people this is nothing, but helping kids grieve is hard. And I am an animal lover myself. So this was a tough blow for me. Then in November of last year my family experienced the beginning of the end for my sweet, beloved Pawpaw. Those months leading up to his death in February of 2011 were some of the darkest, heaviest I have ever experienced. Meanwhile changes were happening in my own heart, my family, and my church that stripped away a lot of who I thought I was and who I thought God was.

I hope I am on the tail end of this so-called 'season of loss.' These days I'm doing a lot of processing and evaluation. There have been so many songs that have come out in the past few months that have helped me through this. I could write a whole post exclusively about that. I don't feel I have a lot of wisdom I have gained from the experiences to pass along. But I do just keep going back to that well known passage of Scripture:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
He has made everything beautiful in its time.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, 11

I cling to the hope of that. In HIS time He will make everything beautiful. I have to. If I don't have that hope I can't manage. I can't make sense of the mess that this world throws at me. I have to believe that He loves me, cares for me. And that He brings seasons of loss and seasons of joy in our lives to make US beautiful in His time.

On a MUCH lighter note, I thought I'd throw some pix up of The Yahoos and The Honey as we partake of this autumn season and all the awesomeness that it brings our way. Enjoy!