Accepting Your Season of Life and Growing Where You’re Planted

“Truly charity has no limit; for the love of God has been poured into our hearts by His Spirit dwelling in each one of us, calling us to a life of devotion and inviting us to bloom in the garden where He has planted and directing us to radiate the beauty and spread the fragrance of His Providence.” -St. Francis De Sales

Today we’re going to consider where we are now and how that can help us in our journey to becoming family.

St Francis offers the challenge is to be present where God has put you and to work to bear good fruit in that place.

This “place” we will call your season of life.

Seasons of Life

When considering forming or strengthening our family, practically, it is important to be realistic about your current season of life.

Are you students? Dating long distance? Engaged and working? Engaged but not yet working full time? Newlyweds? Have young children? Married and noticing something missing? Empty-nesters? In between career changes? Facing the need for physical or mental health healing?

We sometimes may wish that we could simply become the family want to be, we live in the real world and these (and many other factors) play a role in how our family functions in the present moment. While it’s lovely to dream together about the future, you live in the present and you have to get through the now. And in an attempt to bypass the present, you risk missing out on the adventure of getting to the future.

The struggles of the present are the building blocks of your future relationship. What you’re experiencing together now will bond you two, will strengthen your marriage, and undoubtedly mold your future family.

Name It and Claim it

When being realistic about our seasons of life, it is important to claim that season, and lean into what God wants to do in that season.

For example, if you’re engaged, it’s important to claim the season engagement. When you’re engaged, you’re not pre-married. With all of our seasons, it’s easy to live in a way that longs for the future, and that is especially true during an engagement.

If we fall into this trap, all the engagement becomes is a planning time for the wedding day. But you’re not pre-married, and you’re not “dating: the sequel”. You’re engaged to be married. And in that engagement, God wants to work to prepare your soul for the vows you are about to exchange.

Engagement should be a time of intimate preparation so that you enter married life ready to accept all that the Sacrament will demand of you. If your engagement is just an extension of your dating life, you’ll assume marriage is just an extension of that. And it’s not. It’s an intensely person time of sharing, growing, and sacrifice.

Currently, we are tempted to look forward to the days of less sleep deprivation, dirty diapers, and constant noise. But what may we miss in wishing away these years with young children? Answer: helping them to grow in security and virtue!

God doesn’t want us living in such a way that we miss the present moments because we’re too busy looking past them to “better days ahead.”

Rooted in the Present

The engaged example applies to all walks of life.

God has gifted you the present. It may not always seem like a gift, but, looking back on the obstacles we’ve faced, both as individuals and as a couple, we regret the missed opportunities we’d had to use those times to grow together. We also are grateful for the moments we recognized the chance to bond in the current challenge, whatever that may have been.

Uniting ourselves and our commitment to our family in times of job loss, mental and physical health crises, financial uncertainty, homeowner emergencies, and tense relationships with family and friends has strengthened our resolve to face life together. And the times we’ve attempted to avoid hard times, by looking to the future for comfort, we’ve missed opportunities to grow in holiness. We didn’t grow where we were planted.

The truth of the matter is, parenting young children, taking care of aging parents, facing infertility, finishing up grad school, walking with a child through addiction, job hunting, or feeling lonely while surrounded by family are all very real struggles and seasons of struggle.

But they can serve a greater purpose. They can be the soil that will one day bear good fruit.

You can either allow them to mold and form you into better, or they can leave you withered and bitter. We can either dig into grace, or shake our fists in anger. We can root ourselves in who we are, or blow away wherever the wind takes us as we try to be someone, something, or somewhere we’re not.

Be careful not to pray the difficult seasons away and fall into the trap of “once this season is over, we can finally ____”.

Instead, ground yourself into the present, and realize God is waiting right there to make sure this time isn’t wasted.

In every season of trial, there is possibility for pruning and blooming. The Cross and the Resurrection.

Bear fruit. - Renzo and Monica