I’m originally from California, but for the past 18 years have lived on the eastern side of the United States.  So let’s just say winter has taken some getting used to.  In the part of California where I grew up, winter meant rain.  Lots of rain.  For nine months, little to no rain.  For three months, nothing but.  Which meant that the green season in California was in the winter.

Not so over here.

In the Shenandoah Valley, where I now have the privilege of living, the green goes away in the winter.  Colors dim.  Most of the trees lose their leaves.  The landscape looks as if it has been blighted.

The world looks as if it is dying.

And this is not only true of lawns and trees, flower beds and hillsides.  Pastors in our area note that winter time is when there tends to be the greatest uptick in funerals.  People seem to die more often in the winter.

Some respond to this time of year by fleeing: for a week, or maybe a month, or half a year.  Some respond by staying and complaining.  When people speak of another place beyond the grave, where there will be no more mourning or pain, few—if any—picture winter.

And yet…the sacred Hebrew texts suggest that this might be what the Giver of Life intended.  Genesis, the first book in the Hebrew canon of Scripture, begins with the Divine approaching a world that was “formless and empty”, a world sitting in darkness.  The Divine is spoken of as approaching the “waters”, code for “chaos” in the ancient Near East.

In other words, the Scriptures begin, not with God creating something out of nothing, but with God bringing shape and order to chaos and disorder.  And the very first order the Giver brings to this chaos and tumult is light.  Specifically, light that will mark “day” and “night”.  The first gift of the Giver is time, rhythm, and…season.

Which means that, in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, winter is a good thing.

It is not something to be ignored or fled from.  Winter is gift.

Of course, we all know this.  The beauty and brightness and awe-some explosion of spring is the direct result of the precipitation, wind, and freeze of winter.  It is not just contrast; it is cultivation.  Winter tills the soil that metamorphosizes into spring.  Life, it turns out, is dependent on death.

I learned this my first year in Kentucky.  I started a garden, filled with pride that I was going to grow tomatoes and corn, pumpkins and peppers.  And I did.  But I also grew all these other lifeforms that I never intended or wanted.  By the middle of the growing season, I was tilling rows between the weeds.  And these “plants” weren’t just in my garden; they were everywhere.

And the weeds would have won.

Except winter.

Perhaps you need a season of dying to promote and participate in cultivated living.  This is why Christians began building in the rhythm of Lent into their preparation for Easter, that day when Christians remember the resurrected life of Jesus.  Lent comes at the end of the winter season, a time when the trees and earth appear dead.  Followers of Jesus have taken this time to pay attention to those things in themselves that need to die, that have nothing to do with Jesus, that need to wilt and wither so that Jesus’ life might morph and multiply in their lives.

“Lent”, by the way, means “spring”.  It is a recognition that something new can be birthed when we do the work of embracing what in ourselves needs to die.

This is how we recognize that we are part of this seasoned place, that we, too, need to live into the spring and summer and fall…and even winter of the world in which we are an intimate part.

Winter invites us, in the chaos and tumult and formless/voidness of our lives, into a season of slowing down and letting some things go.  Letting some things die.  It is how our living and thriving actually works.

Because death is never the last word.  Nor is darkness.  Nor is winter.  They are fertilizer to bigger and brighter life, if only we would let them do their work in us.

If only we would do our work in them.