Seasons of life are just that – seasons.

I’m going through a new season called perimenopause. Queue the nods of midlife women everywhere.

There are days where life feels sucked out of me. Staying on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, mindlessly scrolling Instagram with a cat is all I really feel like doing. As a solopreneur though, I can’t settle for a day of nothingness so I push through and try to accomplish just a little something vs my mega-list of “all the things”.

“This is temporary”, I tell myself over and over. Because it is. The next morning I’ll wake up feeling like I was born again. Sometimes this cycle happens in the same day. Remembering that these feelings are temporary, I believe, has been how I show myself some grace.

Recognize the Season

The key becomes to recognize what season we’re in and live in the grace and peace needed for that season because God gives us grace for every season.

Hebrews 4:16 – “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Especially when we’re going through something hard, we can find the grace that helps in Him. We are not finding this anywhere else. This is a supernatural grace that might show up through other people, but it is always from Him.

We think grace means we will be rescued from the situation. But most often grace is there to help us get through it. The grace to endure. Pain. Heartache. Grief. Frustration. Weakness.

And as hard as some of these seasons are, they are not a waste of time. 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 says, “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Here I think is the sum of it all. Why grace helps us endure vs rescue. It’s achieving “an eternal glory” – one where we look more like our heavenly Father, where we exhibit His love, grace and hope. And we can demonstrate it to the world in the midst of our trials and tribulations. Recognize the season as one of growth.

Recognize it’s Momentary

Paul calls these times “momentary”. In other words, it’s temporary. Maybe if we can remember that the things, the feelings, the upheaval we are dealing with at the moment is a temporary situation that is forging us for eternal glory we can adopt better attitudes.

Everything has its 15 minutes of fame. Good times. Bad times. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 says,

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

On the backdrop of eternity, this life is but for a moment. Our emotions are “here today and gone tomorrow”. There’s this feeling when we are going through things that this is going to be our “new normal”. And yes, sometimes it may go on for months and even years. Our job is to endure, like a good soldier, the season we’re in. Time doesn’t stop, and, at some point, that circumstance, that feeling, that life we live will change – usually so gradually that we only realize it in retrospect. Let that grace from God to endure power us through these “momentary” times so that we can achieve that eternal glory.