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My spiritual director once told me that she felt that seasonality was placed in my heart for a reason - my instinct is always to feel that whatever the day gives is permanent. Future rain feels impossible on dry hot days, peace feels impossible on the suffering days. That's where faith, and a faith based in the gift of seasonality, has been the path I have chosen to hold fast to.

I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis' Uncle Screwtape:

"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before."

"Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship."

"This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns."

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Jul 25, 2023Liked by S.E. Reid

This summer will not ends. I’m driving 4-6 hours a day to get my kiddos to their designated activities/therapies/school. After my husband had an emergency surgery, I’m feeling the pressure of being the one who’s holding it all together...between the heavy lifting, housework, childcare, and stressing over all the bills.

I am finding God in noticing the details in my drives. Picking up my kids and hearing about their day. I’m having my whole family at home, healthy and cared for. And yet with all of that said, I am so ready for back to school and fall weather!

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Jul 25, 2023Liked by S.E. Reid

That's so much to take on Rikki. Just came in with a rain soaked head of hair. Checking this while drying off. Have to take out the garbage in a few mins. Will be using that time to send a wee prayer for you and what you're shouldering right now. Praying for unexpected joys, peace and mercies during this season.

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Thank you

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I’m o a sort of season of sameness at work. I think it feels like something should change because I’ve now been at this job longer than I have any other, and have now had the same position for a few years. It seems like change is imminent but I don’t actually see any change happening. At least not there. But in the past two weeks I have started to use my lunch breaks as writing breaks which has produced some writing I’m proud of already. So some change has come and it’s been very cool. Just mot a change I thought I would see.

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Last night we got our first rain in what feels like forever here in the high desert. It wasn't much, but the whole morning smelled of it. The damp had dried back to dust before the sun even broke over the mountains, but the smell lingered. There was a long period of sameness for me that we are only recently coming out of; that of always having a small baby in the house. Our children are 8, 7, 5, 4, and almost 2. At one point (it only lasted a few months) we had three in diapers. For the first time in 7 years, we're down to only one! We're starting to sleep (mostly) through the night again, kids are old enough to start helping around the house and even with the younger siblings. We're shifting into a new season, and it's exciting and also just a bit sad; I do love little babies. The change I prayed for during that season was often things like "please let this baby sleep tonight" or "please let this illness pass quickly" or "please make this child stop screaming!" and I felt a distinct lack of response to those prayers. It was maddening. It was discouraging. I felt so defeated, so ignored. And then something somebody said once, I don't even remember what it was exactly, inspired me to shift my prayers. "Please, when this baby wakes up, help me to be patient. Help me to enjoy the snuggles. Help me to be kind to the other children and to my husband tomorrow when I am feeling unrested." I stopped (mostly) asking for a change in my circumstances and instead asked for a change in myself. And I think the ability to do that was in and of itself a manifestation of God walking by my side in that season.

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Praying for a change in myself is a needed reminder.

I'm in the baby stage again, my other son just turning 6 and my youngest is almost 9 months old. I find myself praying for sleep, for a break, for resources, but like you mentioned, nothing seems to change. As I write, I realize Im praying for my circumstances to change instead of praying to be formed through and within them. This is the shift I needed. Thank you. ❤️❤️

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It's so hard to not pray for circumstances to change. I find myself doing it all the time. I love how you phrased it, being formed through and within them. It's like praying that instead of being removed from the fire, you can withstand it and be refined by it. I'm so grateful my experience could help. Sometimes I think that we go through certain things specifically so we can act as a support to others who will go through the same things and together we can make it to the next season 💚

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And I have sought and found God more as I write because I do want to always point tho Him no matter what I write.

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Same here!

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Jul 24, 2023·edited Jul 24, 2023Liked by S.E. Reid

Really nice. First time I got down to your tiny words.

The ones I can still eat.

Everything else

Is under cooked birds

With feathers

Any proper cat would loathe to suffer

Also, you prayed for rain, and I got a tiny Hurricane.

Ain't life a dream?

Rowing gently, gently, gently; down the stream.

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Jul 24, 2023Liked by S.E. Reid

Sending up a rain dance prayer from weedom along with you. Our second cutting of hay isn't worth doing. In previous floods and droughts, we learned that the Creator's timing is not like ours. We watch the weeds adjust themselves to the timing. Their are miniature versions of some plants, getting their reproductive cycle completed at a fraction of their normal size. The deep rooted plants are dominating. Some plants are waiting till next year, dormant in the seed bank of the soil. We remember that it's raining north and south of us, and take a lesson from the weeds to reset our clocks to Creator's time.

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I attempt to take each day as it comes, being mindful that there is wonder in every moment. I ATTEMPT to.😁

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THIS!!

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Jul 26, 2023Liked by S.E. Reid

Such a beautiful post and yes, I resonate with the idea of “sameness” which I’m going through myself at the moment with my work. What I try to remember during times such as these is the seasons in my life where, primarily due to family health issues, where all I wanted was “sameness” and ordinary days where I didn’t have to worry about a loved one in the hospital, doctor’s visits, are they in pain, etc. And, as I get older (I turned 60 last December), I realize more and more how precious each day is and how quickly they pass. This helps me with my tendency to want to “get through” a day. Instead, I have been focusing on finding something that brings me a few minutes of joy, even in the midst of having things on my plate I’m not looking forward to doing.

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