The big truth: There are seasons of life that are God-designed
If you look closely at all the events on the timeline of your life, you will see certain patterns appear. Certain seasons of life. Everyone has them. And the key truth is: we are designed by God to fit these seasons. So we need to honor them.
For some of us, that sounds too simplistic to matter. For others of us, we may even rebel against that concept. (“I shouldn’t have to live according to some arbitrary notion that there are life seasons!”) But hang in there with me as I explain this. Because I think you will see that this concept is one of the most overlooked factors to thriving in life. It is also one of the key concepts you can unpack in my bible study Find Balance, and the companion book The Life Ready Woman.
Here’s the starting point. If you look at every person who has ever lived on the planet, you will see that certain biological and emotional factors are just true, in general. It is just the way God created life to progress. When we are children, we generally develop at a particular pace, and we need the loving care of an adult in order to have our physical and emotional needs met. If we don’t have that, we tend not to thrive. As we get older, we long to spread our wings and fly away from the nest. If we are prevented from doing so for too long, we tend not to thrive.
As adult women, as we move into our child-bearing years, there is a window of time in which we can get pregnant and bear children fairly easily. Then less easily. Then not at all. That doesn’t mean we cannot adopt and raise children at any time we choose—of course we can—but simply that it becomes difficult or impossible to bear biological children. Similarly, if we do have children at some point in our 20s or 30s, we are in a window of time in which we have a responsibility to care for our little ones who need physical and emotional care in order to thrive.
And of course, things then progress: Our kids grow up, leave the nest, we care for aging parents, we parent adult children, and we age ourselves.
Seasons.
Each season has its own God-given beauty and joy and each also comes with God-designed limitations. And because these gifts and limitations are God-designed, a huge part of our thriving in life comes from our willingness to honor how God designed us rather than fighting against it and/or simply believing it “shouldn’t” be that way.
So let’s look at our first and most important action step.
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