What scripture says about seasons you didn't choose
Not every season is one you'd have picked. Scripture is more honest about that than most of the encouragement built on it.
There is a particular verse that gets handed to women in hard seasons, usually on a card, usually with the best of intentions.
Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it lands like being told to cheer up.
Scripture is less tidy than the quotes from it
The passage about a time for everything, in Ecclesiastes, is read at funerals as comfort. Read whole, it is bleaker and stranger than that — a man looking hard at how little of the timing is ours.
A third of the Psalms are complaints. Job's friends spend chapters explaining his suffering to him and are told at the end that they were wrong to.
The book does not flinch from unwanted seasons, and it does not hurry people through them. Most of the encouragement built on top of it does both.
Scripture gives far more room to grief and waiting than the verses we pull out of it usually suggest.
What it does not promise
It does not promise a reason you will be given now. It does not promise the season will be short. And it does not promise that your faith will feel strong while you are in it.
Being clear about that matters, because promises the Bible never made are the ones that break people's faith when they fail to arrive.
What it does say
- That God is present in it rather than waiting at the end of it
- That lament is a legitimate way to speak to Him — most of the Psalms model it
- That you are not required to feel grateful for the season in order to be held through it
- That endurance is treated as something formed slowly, not summoned
The waiting itself
Some of the longest waits in scripture are simply long. Sarah, Hannah, the years in the wilderness, the silence between the testaments. Nobody is told at the outset how long.
That is not a comforting pattern exactly. But it does mean a long wait is not evidence that you have been forgotten or have done something wrong, which is the fear that usually sits underneath.
“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart.”
Psalm 27:14If you cannot pray about it yet
Then say that, and say it to Him. "I don't want this" is a prayer. So is silence in the direction of God rather than away from Him.
The people in scripture who argued with God were not the ones who lost their faith. They were the ones still talking.
These are personal reflections. Please weigh them against scripture and your own church community and leadership rather than treating them as doctrine.
