SEASONS

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“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:” Ecclesiastes 3:1

Seasons come and then they go. Activities begin and so do they end, depending on where you are in that temporal duration.                                      

“Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; all the rest have thirty-one, excepting February alone, and that has twenty-eight days clear and twenty-nine in each leap year.” Mother Goose

Those are a lot of days. They can be long or short days, depending on how you fill them up, especially in our modern societies in which we have tendencies to take on too much.

I’ve reflected a lot on recent seasons. Through floods to blooming flowers of spring, drought to languid warmth of summer, wilt to dancing leaves of autumn, frigid to frolicking in snowy winter. I’ve pondered deeply. And I sensed my heart’s song shift directions.

Sometimes the sense of shifting can cause fragile humans to become rigid, uncomfortable with change. Indeed, I’m a fragile human. Even so, in tasks, directions, a heart’s song altering tempo, I ask God to ever lead, guide me through whichever season happens to play out in this present time. An unnamed saying I’d first learned years ago comes to mind again.

“Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.”

If we’re flexible, we then can be molded. We don’t need to understand how or why, necessarily, just be obedient, and in turn, optimism for the future might lead us into a clearer vision of significance. If led, of course, by the hand of the One who guides. Jesus, the clearer and trimmer of our paths…

This happens to be my last post with International Christian Fiction Writers. I have deeply appreciated my time contributing to this blog. ICFW is a great group and I’ve enjoyed connecting with all of you. Thank you for having welcomed me aboard! The voyage proved to be a great blessing in many ways. I will remain a reader of this blog and plan to stop in every so often to say, “Hey.”

I do hope your present season proves exhilarating, one where you are exactly where God wants you to be. Wherever you are, whatever the elements bring, even if circumstances howl, burn, wither, or chillingly slice, I pray you will stand to perceive only the best in every situation. If March comes in like a raging lion, may you see only the lamb bouncing in lush pastures, in the endless days of summer may you live in the full force of its glorious warmth! Let autumn exhibit the colors of growth and change revealing maturity and endurance, in winter the pristine purity of freshly fallen snow positively fashioned with fortitude.

This is my wish for you.

A veteran of the performing arts and worldwide missions, Tessa Stockton also contributed as a writer/editor for ministry publications, ghostwriter for political content, and headed a column on the topic of forgiveness. Today, she writes romance and intrigue novels in a variety of genres. www.TessaStockton.com

 

Seasons

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." - Ecclesiastes 3:1

Autumn is touching western South Dakota already. Gone are the blazing days of over-a-hundred-degree temperatures, settling into soft warmth for cricket-filled night. No, the minute the calendar switched to August, a coolness crept into the evening air. A crispness, like a one of the season's last melons. Stars burn clear and bright in the night sky--thousands of them--thick as glittering morning fog. When my son goes out to play in the golden-hued late afternoon, he pulls on a jacket. Goldenrod pokes up in yellow beacons along a roadside choked with empty raspberry bushes, fallen wild roses, and elm leaves tinged the color of late squashes.

Even our ginger-striped tabby cat, christened "Charlie Broccoli" by my three-year-old son (don't ask; I don't know why, either, except it had something to do with Veggie Tales and Charlie Brown) is reluctant to slip out the door at nightfall as he's done for months. Last night I scooped him off the sofa at nearly ten o'clock, a warm ball of purring fuzz, and set him on the front step. "Go catch mice," I said, or something to that effect. "Good night." He gave the moon a chilly look, then me, and slipped back inside between my ankles.

Even I am changing as I try to fit my bulging belly into shirts and jeans that once skimmed a smooth waistline. I toss them wistfully one-by-one into the "after-December-when-I-can-finally-bend-over-again" box and thumb through my shrinking closet for something, anything, that will button or fasten or whatever it's supposed to do without gapping or making me hold my breath.

We are all changing. Nothing, no matter how permanent it may seem, usually is.

One of the biggest changes I've noticed lately is in my own writing habits--which have been a part of me since even before I could pen (or crayon) correct sentences. I've spent far more time staring at a blank screen than I have in years, and my idea list looks more like a grocery list gone insane: "...how about that historical fiction novel?... don't forget to pick up peaches at the grocery store... holy cow, you forgot to pay the trash company again... the Colorado peaches, not the California ones that ripen to the consistency of wrinkled softballs... so... what am I supposed to be writing about again...?"

I have almost no ideas--or no good ideas--and my brain feels like the Cream of Wheat I ate this morning as I put my hands on the keys.

It's bothering me. A lot. HELP!! When was the last time I didn't write... anything? Really? I mean, I just pumped out four full-length novels in less than three years--one of which finaled in the Christy Awards, for pity's sake--and have edited galleys, critiqued, proofread, worked on cover art, written interviews and articles, posted on blogs, and made a general nuisance of myself to the writing world. 

Oh, and all of this took place after we 1) adopted a preemie with health issues; 2) raised said preemie to a running, jumping, bilingual, always-yakking, always-smiling three-year-old (how I'm not really sure; I know nothing about babies or children); 3) went through a harrowing process of brain surgery with Ethan to correct a malfunctioning shunt for hydrocephalus, and 4) underwent the grueling immigration process for my husband and son and moved to the U.S. after eight years abroad. So it wasn't like I was sitting around knitting for those three years. (If I knew how to knit, which I don't). We were busy. Our lives were upside-down. We barely slept.

So what's my problem now??!

Why can't I write? Why won't the words and ideas flow like they used to? Especially now that I'm not doing night feedings (yet) or running to the American Embassy with more paperwork or trying to explain to my annoying, rude neighbor why the U.S. supports Israel over Iran all in Portuguese. We speak ENGLISH in South Dakota, for crying out loud!

I've been praying about this problem for a while, and the thing that floats up to the surface of my thousand thoughts are this: seasons.

We are always moving and breathing and living in seasons. Life changes. Moods change. Pregnancy saps brain cells and productivity (so it seems for a lot of women)--especially when running after a three-year-old who is probably either trying to climb to the top of a huge feed tank, spray himself and everybody else with the garden hose, or ride our friends' chocolate lab like a horse. (Yes, all of those things actually happened, and recently).

Perhaps for me, the season to furiously write is passing. Fading. Melting into a season of quiet patience and reflection that I, having never been pregnant before, have never known. 

Perhaps now is the time for me to put down my pen and my laptop and just watch my curly-haired son play in the afternoon sun, the gold of the light turning his hair glorious rusty brown. Perhaps now is the time to gather him up in my arms, all laughter and dirty knees and joyously kissable cheeks, and hold tight the little body that doctors once said might never walk or never talk, and praise the Lord for His mercies--for "they are new every morning."

Perhaps now is the time to fall on my knees in prayer for that same little one who is scheduled to undergo brain surgery once again next month--to fix that shunt that saved his life last year, now starting to malfuction--and thank God for every day of his life, and for protection and peace as we go through such a traumatic process all over again. And yet grateful that we, and not someone else, are called to the task.

Perhaps now is the time for me to close up my notebooks of half-baked ideas and circle my belly with my hands in wordless wonder. For who would have thought that after eight years of nothing, this womb would hold a child? A fluttering, kicking, healthy growing baby whose rounded head and limbs we watched, with rapt disbelief, on the fuzzy black-and-white ultrasound screen? I am not as old as Sarah (yet) but like her I laugh--and cry--at this miracle called life, and how it has been granted to me not once, but twice--to hold and nurture and give back to the Creator.

Perhaps now is a new season for me. A new dawning of responsibilities and priorities. An autumn of sorts, blooming out its golds and rusts before a quiet winter of birth and motherhood, and a family made four from nothing--like the inhabitants of Eden formed from earth and a single rib.

But what about writing? Will it vanish, too, like so many other things in my life?

Of course not.

"Life has its seasons," author Valerie Comer wrote to me just yesterday. "Sometimes it's okay to go with them... (Remember that) God has given you a gift as a writer and author. He hasn't removed it, but your body and brain are busy with other things right now. It's okay. It'll come back."

It'll come back.

I promise. 

Just like green grass after winter snows, and tender shoots where the dried winter grasses lay cold and blond across the field. The clamor of meadowlarks and robins, and the lowing of cattle as spring-young calves leap in green pastures.

I know because I saw it; I lived it. We watched the frozen white fields and mountains of South Dakota turn gold and then green, and spring came once again.

Just as it will in a few short months.

For while our worlds change around us, our Lord will not. He is the rock immovable, the fortress that will never be shaken. "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever."

He will not fail, and He will not fade. Just sa He transitioned me from missionary to international wife and then to mother and author, He will not forget me--or you. Our times are in His hands, and He alone holds our future.

And while season after season may shake our private thoughts and fears, we can hold fast to Him, knowing that He puts the words in our mouth and pen in our hand--and will bring everything in our lives to fruition to give Himself glory.

--

What season are you in now? Have you ever felt like you're in transition and out of control? What holds you in place when the world around you shakes?

--

Jennifer Rogers Spinola lives in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, with her Brazilian husband, Athos, and three-year-old son, Ethan. She has lived in Brazil for nearly eight years and served as a missionary to Japan for two years. Jenny is the author of Barbour Books' "Southern Fried Sushi" series and an upcoming romance novella collection based on Yellowstone National Park (also with Barbour Books). Her first novel, “Southern Fried Sushi,” was a Christy Award finalist in 2012. Right now Jenny is sharing her side of the bed with Charlie Broccoli and hoping Ethan sleeps a little longer this afternoon so she can put her feet up.

Thinking of Good-bye

It's been three months today since the little EmbraAir jet (Brazilian, appropriately) taxied onto the snowy runway in Rapid City, South Dakota. Through frosty plane windows, my son, Ethan, and I watched tropical fields of banana trees and red Brazilian clay fade into ocean, into night, and then into snow-dusted patches of prairie flanked by rugged Black Hills.

We have left Brazil and made our home in South Dakota - for good. My husband joined us in December, and I cannot remember a time I've been happier. All the years stored up waiting have finally come to pass. We are here - we are home!

And yet we have not forgotten all the faces and days we left behind in warm Brazil, where afternoons smell of sunlight and dried leaves, of summer grasses and salt breeze and hibiscus blooms.

Here is something I wrote back in September, never imagining that two short months later I'd be buying American furniture and winter coats and car insurance.

And yet - by some strange miracle, we are.

--

Sept. 3, 2011

I’m sitting here in the Galeão terminal overlooking Rio’s misty, jagged mountains. Lighter spots of favela housing dotting the hillsides like patchwork quilting. A heavy, gray tropical sky. Yesterday I saw the beach, a clear gray-blue under overcast skies, and pale, wheat-colored sand like sugar. Soft as powder beneath our feet. We stripped off Ethan’s shoes and he jumped and danced, barefoot, leaping and rolling and tossing handfuls like he’d been marooned at sea for months. “A mess!” he said in giddy joy, sifting handfuls down over his brown toes.

I just checked in at an automatic check-in machine, entering my numbers and making the mistake of punching “English” for the language option and choosing my nationality as “The United States of America.” Because then, of course, the machine promptly asked for my passport number. Which I didn’t have with me because I don't carry my passport for domestic flights. “You should have said you nationality was Brazilian,” smiled the TAM worker as she helped me punch in my RNE (foreigner’s ID) number instead.

I wheeled my single small suitcase through security, speaking and answering in Portuguese, and found the gate myself. A man just came over to ask me if I’d picked up an Internet connection at the airport. And no, I hadn’t. In fact I couldn’t get one yesterday, either, at the Maingots’ house, because I'd inadvertantly messed up the wireless configuration on my laptop.

All of this I told him in Portuguese without thinking twice. Then I turned back to my laptop to finish editing my third novel and watch the planes take off across dove-gray morning. The mountains disappear, jagged, into the deep, dark, tropical haze like they did in years ago in Fiji.



All at once tears spring close to the surface as I realize, for perhaps the first time, the extent of what I will leave behind. This trip to Rio—our morning spent in the American consulate—has just nearly finished our process for immigration. As soon as they receive my tax forms and Athos’ police report from Japan, they’ll mail us the visas we need for Athos' green card. Ethan will become an American citizen the minute he sets foot in an American airport. We can count the months now, and perhaps even the weeks. The process has gone staggeringly fast—so fast that we are not quite ready for it. I felt the same way in 2009 when, from Monday to Saturday, we became parents of a fragile infant. The mess, the cribs, the trying to figure out how to use a diaper and a bottle—all sprung on us in a few days’ time.

Now I sit here and stare out at the moody runway, a straw color through the tinted glass, and realize that, in a few short months, we will step off the plane into blustery South Dakota winter. Equally unprepared. Our suitcases filled with linen pants and green-and-yellow short-sleeved soccer jerseys. Sleeveless silk blouses and strappy sandals and thin cotton skirts. Jobless and homeless and wondering, as I did the day we carried that warm little bundle into our tiny, one-bedroom-apartment living room and put him in a borrowed crib: "Have we done the right thing? Can we possibly live up to the enormous responsibility required of us, and can we make it work? Make it a blessing?”

“Do we have what it takes?”

“Are we what it takes?"

Suddenly it hits me: For the first time in ten years, I will leave behind my international life. I will no longer be exotic, odd, a curiosity. I wonder, with the first tingles of apprehension, if I will forget my Portuguese. The way my Japanese disappeared, like a reluctant cat, under the bed—toe by toe. Until I can barely coax it out into the light.

I will no longer breeze through international security lines at huge airports in São Paulo and Atlanta, switching languages as easily as I switch international documents. No more chatting in Portuguese about Brazilian soccer while I wend my way through the quicker “Brazilian” line. No more switching coins and currencies. No more blast of warm, tropical air as the airport doors swing open, Brasilia’s concrete terminal verdant with plants and glinting from rippling reflecting pools.

No more chilly green coconuts hacked open with a knife, in three perfect strokes, and pierced with a straw—the severed wedge given as a spoon to cut out the jelly-like white interior. No more macaws screeching from the trees as I run in early morning coolness just before sun-filled heat. No more nodding hibiscus flowers or clear-water beaches or fresh payapas and pineapples, like the sweet, pale yellow cubes I ate this morning for breakfast.



No more bitter Brazilian cafezinho coffee, piping hot and sugary-sweet, in tiny demitasse cups and saucers. No more golden loaves of ubiquitous French bread. No more fresh-squeezed orange juice or mangoes or bananas fresh from the tree at Athos’ grandfather’s farm, or walks through his plantations of blue-silver cabbages and striped zucchinis—dry red soil clinging to our shoes. No more round limes plucked from the limb or thick layers of dark coffee beans roasting in the open sun. No more conversations with my brother-in-law Kyle while we sit in his parents’ wooden house, rain pouring down outside in heavy sheets.

No more sultry bossa nova, at least not without a twinge of what-used-to-be-familiar-now-turned-exotic. No more airline instructions that I understand in either Portuguese or English, and do not remember which language was used. No more palm trees or beach-swept, salty hair or pungent scents of espresso or sautéing garlic.

No more TAM, and no more Brazilian phone numbers with the Brasilia (61) prefix code. I will not need to write +55 in front of my phone number or “BRAZIL” after my address.

After hours in the over-air-conditioned American consulate Friday morning, Athos and Ethan and I walked under palm trees, past tropical blooms and chattering macaws toward Botafogo. Then I took off my fancy heels and walked in the sand along the beach, listening to the waves roar and crash against the beach of Praia do Flamengo. Past empty cabanas where vendors sell coconuts, soccer jerseys, beer, and flip-flops during the summer months. Right across from those black-and-white wave-patterned sidewalk tiles—Portuguese in origin, yet so distinctively Brazilian.

Eternal summer, for better or for worse, is about to become a distant memory. Replaced by snow and cold noses and bitter mornings and brown autumn leaves and simple American addresses and phone numbers and postal codes. When I attend the American Christian Writer’s Conference, I will no longer be “the girl from Brazil.” I’ll be instead “the girl from South Dakota,” with a normal life and a normal residence. Only that I’m not really from South Dakota. I’m from Virginia, but I’m not really from Virginia, either. I’m from South Carolina. Although I’ve never really lived in South Carolina. It’s complicated, really—when who you are becomes somehow who you are not at the same time.



Should we move? Of course we should. We’ve been waiting for this day nearly seven years. I can’t wait to drive a car again. To speak in English and not answer questions constantly about where I’m from. To buy American clothes that fit me, and pay American prices that leave me with a little (or in some cases a lot) more left in my wallet. To earn money again instead of dividing precious reais with my husband and coming up short, all in hopes that we can both pay our bills for the week. To be near my family for a chance—my friends, my memories—and remember a bit the girl I used to be. Back before I left first for North Carolina and then for Japan so many years ago.

More importantly, Athos needs to go. He’s been blocked in here with his education and his job opportunities, neither going up nor forward, nor finding jobs in other cities, and we find our possibilities and assets decreasing almost daily in super-expensive Brasilia, which now boasts a higher cost of living than New York City. Athos needs the peacock fan of opportunities the U.S. can provide—in jobs, in career options, in movement, in locality, and in personal growth. He plans to get his master’s in the U.S.—more cheaply, more quickly, and with a wider array of choices, each of which suit him brilliantly.

My family needs to know Athos, the Brazilian in-law they love but know only as a distant acquaintance who appears in letters, notes, and occasional phone conversations. And Ethan needs to know his American family. The American life God has given him, too, which is equally as important as his Brazilian life—which he knows virtually nothing about.



We want to homeschool, which is illegal here. We want to drive and live in a relatively safer environment, pay lower taxes, choose our own schooling, and earn money to bless others, buy our first home, and adopt again. We want to plant a garden and show Ethan how a tomato grows—in our own backyard. We want him to run free, learning about trees and soil and animals and rugged life, rather than living out of a city apartment and running with whatever ill-behaved neighborhood children happen to congregate below us. We want him to step over snowdrifts and blooming columbines rather than discarded toilet paper and snack wrappers.

It’s done. We decided to move back to the U.S. ages ago, prayed toward it, and when the doors began to open, they opened so rapidly we nearly had to run to hold them back so we’d be ready. Life is never static--always moving, always changing. We cannot dig in our heels and refuse to change when the world around us is shifting, squeezing our family in directions we don't like. The time is coming; the time is nearly now. We will move forward with confidence.

For God's presence will follow us wherever we go--surrounding us like the pillars of fire and cloud as the Israelites camped on the banks of the Red Sea.

Yet I remember now, sitting here in the gray morning of the airport: that whenever we give up something, even for the exponentially better, there is always, always a loss.

I feel it. A little twinge of something sorrowful, a sob rising below the surface. That yes, Brazil, the land I once called the land of my dreams, the place that has torn me from blessing to torment and back again, I will miss you.

I cannot stay here, but I will miss you.

Seven years has woven you into my life like the patterns on a homespun hammock—in glistening, brilliant colors and darkened bands. Beautiful and deceptively strong.

And I will always carry a piece of you with me, wherever I go—like the ivory sand that sifted from my cuffs from when I unrolled my jeans after walking on Praia do Flamengo.


Jennifer Rogers Spinola lives in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, with her Brazilian husband, Athos, and three-year-old son, Ethan. She has lived in Brazil for nearly eight years and served as a missionary to Japan for two years. Jenny is the author of Barbour Books' "Southern Fried Sushi" series (second book released March 1, 2012) and an upcoming romance novella collection based on Yellowstone National Park (also with Barbour Books).