May Your unfailing love be my comfort, according to Your promise to Your servant. Psalm 119:76 (NIV)
We heard the freeze warning on the news, signaling an early winter. My beloved gardens were still producing in early November: seven-foot-tall pepper plants and tomato vines nestling multiple clusters of green tomatoes.
Most of the perennials would simply fall asleep like bears in hibernation, returning the following spring. But what about my twenty-five potted annuals, including my green and flourishing ferns? Before nightfall, my husband and I gathered the plants, covering them with sheets on the back porch. They looked like lumpy ghosts.
The next morning I checked the damage. Most of the perennials survived, but the beautiful, trailing, sweet potato vines lay shriveled, yellow, and brown, along with my colorful coleus plants. Too sad. The annuals would die.
Just when the winter doldrums were descending, I walked into the living room and found my husband had started a blazing fire, comforting and warm. Not only that, he’d collected a sack full of green tomatoes. That night we enjoyed a Deep South staple, fried green tomatoes—for the first time.
Most of us dislike winter, endless days of unchanging, frigid weather, threatening to shrivel our faith and discourage our spirits. Like those dying plants, we may feel useless and void of color.
Jesus taught me a lesson that day, one I often forget. Every season has a purpose. Jesus is like that warm, blazing fire, beckoning us to sit awhile and partake of His comfort and warmth. Even in the harshest circumstances, He will cover us with His love and may even surprise us with good things that emerge from that season, if we’ll watch for them.
Faith Step: Think about a time when it felt like winter in your life. What good things came out of those experiences? Today, thank Jesus for His continuous covering of love.
