In the lives of those who believe and pray, you can be sure of bleak winters of the spirit. We seem to go along so well for a while in prayer and relationships and life, but from season to season we disintegrate. Like the snowy, gusting winter winds, souls and spirits can easy freeze.

It can be very painful. Both dark and lonely. You may suspect or imagine that this will prove to be a creative disintegration, that God is re-creating you, putting you together in the likeness of his Son at a new and deeper level.

Growth is rarely is welcomed and easy and change frightens the heebie-jeebies within is. Similar to a caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly, it can be troubling and distressing. A chrysalis needs sympathetic understanding, so we should be gentle and patient with ourselves as much as we are with others.

This too long season can be hard to live through, this cold winter of the spirit. When you know yourself to be sterile, helpless, unable to deal creatively with your situation or change your own heart, you regonize your need for a Savior. Now you know what Advent is all about.

God brings us through these winters, these dreary times of deadness and emptiness of spirit, as truly as God allows winter to follow autumn. It becomes a necessary transition towards our next spring. A godless, absent feeling fills a body as much as winter’s windchill. We may feel “godless” but we yell to our friend, “God, it’s cold today!”

Looking back, you know that empty times like this brings you closer to the Lord of the winter, that it was necessary for you to be frozen – whether in our ego, selflessness or spiritual doubts.

In the winters of your prayer, when there seems to be nothing but darkness, hold on, wait for God. Put on a strongly woven sweater of patience and perseverance.

It’s another winter and it’s another Advent. God will come. Advent is all about waiting. But don’t wait too long. “God will come!?” Yeah, right.

God never left.

Based on the writings of Sr. Maria Boulding, “The Coming of God”