the drama of the seasons

I hate winter. I absolutely loathe it. The deadness. The coldness. The ice webbed over the sidewalk and the snow crunching under the tires. I hate the wind that is so cold and fierce that it bites into your skin and makes you bleed. This is one of the coldest winters we’ve had in a long time, and I am absolutely ready for it to leave. I look forward to the spring, when I will go to the park and sit under the shade of the trees, when the flowers are all bursting open, when the bees return to life. “Come awake, O Sleeper.” In Geology class, we contemplated what it means that when God saw all He had made, He declared it “Very Good.” I think it means that what God created pleases Him. The professor believes it means that what God created is good for life. I always wondered if the seasons were a direct result of the Fall, the deadness of winter being a reminder of what took place with mankind’s first act of disobedience: falling and deadness. And yet the more I think about it, the Seasons are beautiful, each one speaking to different chapters of our lives, speaking to different scenes and acts in the unfolding drama that is lived out in our personal lives, the drama that weaves out beyond ourselves and intersects with the dramas of others, creating even more beautiful and yet tragic dramas that stretch across the global canvas. Maybe God created the Seasons, and He declared them Good, because they speak to our experiences, and also because they speak of the unfolding drama of salvation: birth, death, rebirth. Okay, so that can be interpreted as reincarnation, but that’s not what I’m aiming at. We are born in harmony with God (“Summer”), we Fall from harmony with God in disobedience (“Fall”), we exist in separation from God, alienation from God, and overall deadness in the entire spectrum of our existence (“Winter”); but in Christ, God remakes us, and He will continue remaking us, and He will remake everything, including the universe itself (“Spring”). Perhaps God, in His foreknowledge, designed the Seasons to remind those of us in certain hemispheres of the world of the story of redemption.