To The Untamed Heart.

It’s January and the pumpkin patches are still rotting, adding to the difficulty of figuring out what season we are actually living in these days in northeast Ohio. The trees are bare, save some straggling leaves still in denial they’re dead, holding on until something breaks their grasp for them. There’s a dust of snow in the crevices of the trees, otherwise all is wet yellow grass and muddy roads. Then there are the pumpkin patches that line the roads, orange murk slowly subsiding into the earth.

It’s like no one has told the pumpkins they should be gone by now.

Hello, it’s New Years Day. Please go away and make way for snow or Spring.

Rotting pumpkins aren’t exactly fitting my new years vibe.

Pumpkins are so out of season.

Yet, there they all sit, soaking in the mud. Becoming the mud.

Fertilizing the soil.

It’s not how I want my winter days. I like when the days match the season and holiday. I want my Christmases covered in snow, my Easters filled with sunshine and hope of warm weather, my fourth of Julys with the warm night air and rainless and humid.

I want my life to be tidy like this, too. I will grieve in a season of grief but I want the sore spots to know their place and stay out of the good days of celebration. I want my birthday to be full of sunshine and joy and sans any fighting or attitudes from my children. Likewise every other holiday. Tears do not belong on the holidays unless they are happy.

But the pumpkins are rotting in January.

And we need them to rot.

You need them to rot.

Sure it doesn’t always feel timely when things hit the fan. Don’t I know it. You just don’t need this right now. You have enough on your plate.

But the pumpkins have to rot.

They need to fertilize the soil for spring.

The good things we want to grow and the hope we have for the future-

the promises we are waiting and longing and fasting to see fulfilled-

they need this.

I know we requested a clean break and a fresh start in 2024. I know it would be way more appealing and sit better on the stomach if it looked a lot more hope and rainbows, but this is a fertilizing and this is a tilling and the Lord is preparing the soil for the seed.

Don’t lose hope.