Winter

I love and hate the Winter. I love trying to be warm. I love coats and jackets and warming up with a friend a coffee shop. I love the adventures it brings. Walking two miles in the snow makes a trip epic that in the summer time would be average. Winter is beautiful. It's a season of testing for me. Every single year. God aligned me with the seasons for some reason. Every year in the autumn I begin to fight depression. Some times over change, sometimes over stagnation. Either I don't have many friends or I am upset with them or some tragedy or hardship has occurred or is occurring. But one day out of every year near the beginning of winter when it's cold and bitter and things aren't well, God speaks to me in some form or fashion. Usually he says something through an experience whether it's a talk with some one a reoccurring subject, it happens, like clockwork. He always affirms it, speaking directly to my heart afterward. It always feels different though. It always is different but it is always the same thing, the same lesson on a new level, in a new way. I am surprised at the fact that I am surprised every year. Patience, persistence, endurance.

Right now it's a combination of things, Culture shock, college shock, new environment, new people having to start from scratch developing friends, new community. The hardest things are the culture and the people. I was never raised in a church and most people here seem as though they were. Different language, different humor, different hobbies. Such a strange thing to grow accustomed to. Well God spoke to me today and he has been but his point got across today. I have been struggling with depression and the feeling of not fitting in because of how different I am. Some of it is skewed perception of myself and other people but a large part is just confusion in the matter. Satan likes to play off of my confusion and twist things and make things more difficult to dissuade me from the long perilous journey I am on.
I am also tempted at times to try hard, real hard, too hard. You see I am a very hard headed person. Two things will illustrate this. a "If you tried hard and it didn't work then you didn't try hard enough" mindset. I tend to use this mindset mostly in my own struggles and goals. The second illustration is a spectrum

Easy-going -------------------------------------------- Over-bearing
                                        Happy Medium

People that are easy going have a weakness of being to lax, or lazy with personal growth, responsibilities, etc.
People that are over-bearing have a weakness of doing overkill, laying on too much, stressing themselves out, etc.

I think where you place yourself on the spectrum you should try hard to develop your weakness which would trend toward the opposite side.

Example: Easy going people don't have to try to be easy going, they just are. So if they try to be determined and ambitious they will fall short of the people who overkill everything. But their falling short will land them in the happy medium.

Everything in moderation.
 I think this should be applied to many areas of our life for healthy productive, spiritual, mental, emotional and physical growth.

But it is clear and set now what the situation is and how to handle it. No easy solutions. So I was trying to hard to get through this and the thing I've learned is that there are no answers to this problem of not fitting in. Simply persevere. Sometimes there aren't answers to things, you just hold on tight to the Father and bear it. Try also to learn from it. Try to enjoy the culture, enjoy what the people enjoy.

So I will bask in the beauty of the season and work easy and play easy because I tend to over shoot. Sometimes there is no solution.

"Sometimes all you can do is suffer...and suffer well." -Lane Moss