Where I live, the September days are shrinking, as though someone has been taking snatches of the top. The afternoons are shorter, the evenings darker. When I pick my son up from soccer this evening, night will have nearly fallen; when the league began several weeks ago, the sun still shone brilliantly as we turned our mini-van towards home.

I’ll be honest: I don’t like this change, this nickel-and-diming of light and life. Living in the northern states as I do, the creeping darkness of autumn doesn’t portend relief from the heat but the marching onslaught of cold—months and months of bitter cold.

In my book All Shall Be Well: Awakening to God’s Presence in His Messy, Abundant World, I contemplate the ways our earth’s ever-repeating cycles and seasons feed us from God’s hand and point us to the Creator. One of the primary, consistent, compelling ways I see this is in the interplay between darkness and light, work and rest. God may have instituted a weekly sabbath for the people of Israel, but he wove sabbath rhythms into all things long before, at the very inception of time.

Can you see it? Do you feel the rise and fall as the earth breathes? Each year, new life in my garden bursts forth with new life in the spring, hurtling itself towards fullness and abundance in summer. But when autumn and winter roll around the soil lies dormant. The trees in the forest lose their leaves, surviving the infertility of shortened sunlight by preserving strength, by embracing dormancy. For months, as the eye can see, creation seems dead, gone, over and done.

But it is not. This dormant period is so much more than it appears on the surface. In reality, life is being prepared, the resources for a new burst of hope and abundance made ready. What looks like failure to survive is in fact necessary preparation to thrive.

As palpable as this truth is in winter, it meets me just as vividly each day. As surely as the sun rises in the east each morning, it sets in the west each night. My body does the same—though I rise with far less joy and aplomb than “a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, a champion rejoicing to run his course” (as the Psalmist describes the sunrise—Psalm 19). Still, I do stumble out of bed each morning, eventually, looking askance at my cheerful children and settling myself into a day of work and family. Sometime after breakfast and coffee my strength returns, and I meet my responsibilities head on. Then, come nighttime, I can go no more. Whoever first crowed “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” was dead wrong: our bodies and minds break down if we don’t lie dormant each and every day—for hours.

If these repetitive lessons are not enough to drive the point home, nearly every second I breath in, breath out—then rest. For a moment I lie still, in between, mindlessly trusting that life will be there, waiting, a second later when I need it.

What do we learn about God in these ever-repeating cycles of rising, fullness, decline, and dormancy? These natural-born God-ordained sabbaths teach me that I cannot stand fully on my own feet; that I must lie, vulnerable, before Him each moment, day, week, and year. That my identity cannot be grounded in constant success and achievement, for I will achieve nothing without embracing seasons of dormancy.

God is God, and I am not. In each sabbath He gives us, I learn to reach my hands to him like a child, and receive the gifts of life.

Catherine McNiel’s book, All Shall Be Well: Awakening to God’s Presence in His Messy, Abundant World, was released on August 6, 2019 with NavPress.

God may have instituted a weekly sabbath for the people of Israel, but he wove sabbath rhythms into all things long before, at the very inception of time Click To Tweet