Editor’s Note: It can be difficult to walk through a long season, but God is our comforter. He is our strength, he is our provider, our deliverer, our refuge, our very present help in time of need. God is with us and is for us. He is not far away. This month, we are going to talk about contentment. Contentment in the valleys, and contentment on the mountains. God is near in both places.
I step outside, curl both hands around a warm mug, and gaze wistfully at the splash of burnt orange stretched across the western sky where the last rays of the sun have just disappeared beneath the horizon. I breathe deep the smell of damp earth and decaying leaves mingled with the sweet smell of apple and cinnamon in my mug. It is the smell of autumn. The quiet stillness of the countryside blankets itself around me, and a gentle breeze brushes across my face. I feel the cares and anxiety of the day begin to wash away, and in the quiet stillness, I know I am not alone.
I love autumn. To me, it is the most beautiful season of the year, and yet, every year beginning in August and lingering until November, I struggle with what some might consider mild depression. For me, like most people, the source of my depression is complex. I mourn the passing of summer, the passing of the year, the waning sunlight, and although all the major losses in my life have occurred in the spring, I mourn them again every autumn.
I was a young mother in the spring of 1992 when my comical and active, red-headed, five-year-old little boy had open-heart surgery. Complications following that surgery left him severely brain damaged. What should have been a week-long hospital stay lasted months. In early August, soon after his sixth birthday, we brought home a child completely changed from the one we took to the hospital. That was when I began to see the reality of my loss. My heart broke and the cracking of it left a fissure that will never completely heal this side of heaven. I cared for Justin twelve years, and he would never walk, talk, feed himself, or even hold his head up again.
Nine years later, in May of 2001, my husband took his life. The sudden trauma of his death left me numb, and again, I could not begin to grasp the reality of that loss until after the farm sale in late August.
I think as we age and begin to experience more losses in our life, each one can revive old memories, even if we have come to a place of peaceful acceptance in our grief. This past March, my Dad died on the sixteenth anniversary of Justin’s death. Although his passing was not as traumatic as the other losses in my life, I have missed him and mourned his death with the coming of fall as the season has once more reminded me of loss.
In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist introduced the five stages of grief. Although everyone grieves differently and not everyone will experience all five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, most of us will experience some degree of these emotions in some order. Isolation and loneliness are also common when grieving, and many therapists link these with depression, but in my experience, I do not think they are quite the same. For me, a natural introvert who seeks solitude on a regular basis anyway, isolation has been the longest stage of grief.
But knowing that we do not grieve like those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14), I have come to embrace the comfort of solitude, for we were not left alone or without comfort. In John 14:16, Jesus says, “And I will pray to the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever;…”(KJV). And just before Jesus ascended, He left us this promise, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20 NIV). So while we are not meant to stay in isolation, I am thankful Jesus meets us there in our grief and provides comfort and contentment for our broken hearts.
And so again, I breathe in the sweet smells of fall, gaze at the beautiful golden horizon, and give thanks for this season and a Comforter who meets us in solitude, and my heart is once more filled with peace and gladness.
We would like to thank Sheila Campbell for writing this post.
Women's Ministry 