The Healthy Spiritual Journey • September 2025: Gathering for All Seasons

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” – Ecclesiastes 3:1

Having spent my formative years on a small family farm in Kentucky, I know a little more than the average person about planting seeds in the spring season and gathering the rewards of that hopeful act in the autumn season. Most people do not live on farms however. Instead, we gather the fruits of our labor in all seasons. Regular paychecks, friends, projects that come to fruition, tithes and offerings to religious institutions or other not-for-profits – these are examples of "gathering for all seasons."

The spiritual seasons of life echo the physical seasons as time quietly unfolds before us. If we are fortunate, we gather wisdom, grace, and connection to others during the seasons of being on planet earth. In just a few days, I will be 75 years old and (I suppose) will enter the winter of my life. For the most part, the seasons of my life have been good to me. I look forward to experiencing what the winter season has to offer also. The things that I anticipate to continue ‘gathering for all seasons’ are the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Spring is the season of beginnings. It invites us to gather hope and to scatter seeds of kindness. In these hopeful days, we have faith about the unseen work beneath the soil. As in Hebrews 11:1, found in the Christian Bible: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Summer is the season of abundance. The sun is more present. Fruits and vegetables ripen. Gathering for this season may take the form of communal get-togethers. Picnics, reunions, outdoor worship, music and laughter under the stars are all examples of sharing and gathering in community during this season.

Autumn is the season of harvest. We gather the fruits and vegetables that have ripened all summer. In the golden hush that follows, we might take time to reflect. Leaves fall, not in despair, but in surrender. In the autumn of our lives, we start learning to let go – of expectations, of burdens, of what no longer serves. Those who realize their abundant blessings want to share the fruits of those blessings. We have been ‘gathering for all seasons’ to share, to live generously, and to love.

Winter is a sacred season of stillness, a time to gather in prayer, contemplation, and the mystery of faith. In silence, God speaks to us. Though the branches are bare, the trees are not dead. They are waiting, storing, preparing. People of faith wait for the culmination of a life well-lived. Our new growth, our new spring, will happen when the “dazzling clarity” of our heavenly home is revealed.

To "gather for all seasons" is to live with spiritual attentiveness, drawing nearer to God and to one another. Let us be people who gather moments of grace, who store up kindness, who harvest wisdom, and who rest in holy stillness. Thus, we honor the sacred rhythm of life - and God, creator of all things.

In God’s love,

Lanny F. Wilson, MD

“The blessedness of waiting is lost on those who cannot wait…They lose the moment when the answers are revealed in dazzling clarity.”– Dietrich Bonhoeffer