As many of you know, I had birthday on April 28th and for the first time in a long time, I also have a 2 1/2 year old and I’m not expecting another child. Now, the Bible talks about seasons and timing in Ecc. 3:1, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Well, I’d like to share with you all about my season change. See for almost ten years I’ve been pregnant or nursing. Since we have had surgical intervention, I am experiencing something different this year, this Summer at age 36. See when you are obligated to a little person, you don’t think about weekend getaways with your spouse or going to conferences with friends. Well you may think about it, just not for long. So as we wind down the school year, I have to do a different type of plan for the summer.

Actually I have a lot of different summer plans because I am writing at professional levels again after a 10 year or so hiatus and we as a family have decided to stick it out this summer as The Spences in Baltimore. Ok, for the new readers, I have to give you a little background. We are from Detroit and all of our family is in Detroit–parents, siblings (except Chanda, who has authored many posts over here at Dahgurl, who is in Chi-town), so the grandkids go North versus the traditional Southern journey for the summer. Since DH doesn’t have to teach over the summer, we tend to go as well and we are there as adults living with their parents for 7 to 9 weeks. Ok, take a deep breath! It wasn’t that bad until last summer. Bad isn’t really the term, but it just became apparent to us that our lives are changing, our family needs are changing and this pilgrimage has to be…reduced to a week here and a couple of days there.

This was not an easy revelation to handle for anyone, but I’ve learned how to know my season and the spiritual season change is not that much different than the natural season change. You start to feel uncomfortable where you are–it’s too hot for what you’re wearing or too cold and you don’t have a jacket. You feel unprepared, confused even though the place where you are is familiar it starts to look and fee differently. Think about some relationships that have gone down the tubes or a job situation where the new supervisor was not like the last one. A season change. You have to make some different choices when the seasons change.

It’s been difficult to establish personality/habits/perspective/legacy when you are not the only adult of influence. I’ve just decided with DH in agreement that we’ve spent so much of our family life being an extension of what our parents wanted. Now we gotta establish who we are as a family/build our own legacy. One of the things that we are going to do this year is we are going to take our first family vacation with just us 7. Because we made such a huge financial sacrifice for me to come home, we hadn’t even thought about taking our kids somewhere. Plus we travel so much as being a part of a large family that we didn’t see how we could swing a vacation with just us. And our family is so wonderful that our children have traveled the world complements of the grandparents. Now it’s time for us to do something that we do, that we can do.

I’m a little nervous–buying a new house this year, running a business with a couple of staff people (did a solo for a while some years back), writing my second book AND establishing a family legacy/tradition built on who we are as a couple. It’s a lot, but I trust God because he wouldn’t have made me write it if this wasn’t the season to make it happen.

Are you working on something and it’s not working the way you think it should? Have you had a season for growth, for change, for building and missed it because you weren’t prepared? Do you not even know how to discern your season or what to do in your season? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear what’s changing for you.