Sorry to say, but your season in my life has come to an end

Church people jump on traditional bandwagons faster than bank robbers in a getaway car.

We are quick to grab hold of a great quote or saying (especially if it rhymes) and run with it all the way out of the church, into our cars and take it to our homes, to our workplaces and into our personal lives. Nothing wrong with that, particularly if it leads to positive results and more importantly to spiritual and personal growth.

However, many of us don’t decipher between what just sounds good and what is really good. We grab it all and run with it and sometimes it does not fit into our home life; it’s out of place in our work life and sometimes it tend to create havoc in our personal lives.

A perfect example of that is all this talk about “seasons” in our lives. Everywhere you turn now, people are encouraging you that “this is your season” or “your season is around the corner”. The truth is each and every one of us are always in a season – whether it’s winter, spring, summer or fall.

But when church people talk about a coming season or being in their season, usually they are talking about a season of blessing or financial prosperity. Even this approach is half-cocked, because we ignore the fact that some of us could be in a winter season, where everything goes wrong.

I know we don’t like to hear that because it’s too negative and we dare not “confess” that over our lives. After all, God would want us to be in a season of blessing and financial prosperity, wouldn’t he? We are convinced that the other seasons don’t apply to us, only to the earth, which goes through every season, every single year and that includes the hard, cold cycle of winter.

However, the fact that as human beings (Christian or not) we are all always in a season in our lives – sometimes a good season and sometimes a bad season is not my focus here in this blog.

My focus is the way we use this idea of “seasons” out of context, especially when it comes to other people. Because church people adapt to tradition faster than a chameleon changes to the surface which in comes in contact with, too many of us have used this whole teaching on “seasons” to eliminate people from their lives.

What do I mean? For example, two people have been friends for a few months or years, but the moment a tough time in the relationship pops up, one of them (I guess the spiritual giant of the two) announces that person’s season in her life is over and so she is quick to move on from the relationship.

It is such a convenient way for many of us to not work on our relationships. The truth is many of us are terrible at relationships and we don’t possess the capacity to interact with other human beings. Maybe because we are selfish, we may never have been properly socialized or we just don’t know how to get along with other people. Many of us were never taught how to play well with others.

So, instead of going to the other person and try to find out what was the issue in the relationship and try to mend it, we simply conclude that person’s season in our lives is completed and so is the friendship. There was no attempt to work out what was the problem. Maybe you were offended by something the other person did or maybe you offended the other party, but instead of admitting that there was a problem, a decision was made to “leave it alone” and just not bother with trying to mend the relationship.

These days it has become popular to eradicate people out of our lives by being spiritual about it and God gets the blame for it. Sometimes it does not even have to be something going wrong for one of the individuals to end the relationship.

This modern, western culture church has become so used to using people that the moment someone come into our lives, as Christians, the first thing that crosses our minds is that God brought this person into my life to bless me. And so we begin to look at this person to see exactly what it is they can bring to our lives, ignoring even the smallest inclination that maybe, just maybe God had brought that person into your life so that you could be a blessing to them.

No, we begin looking for what this person can bring to our lives. Is it a financial blessing, a networking blessing, or someone to use to advance our own personal agenda? And the moment we have sucked everything out of that person and we feel that they have nothing else to offer us we conclude that, according to the Bible, their “season” in our lives is completed and we discard them.

I’ve read the Bible enough to know that does not even sound like God. Are we suggesting that God use people and then discard them like Samson threw away the donkey jawbone the moment he was finished with it?

That may sound offensive to some people to think that God would do that, yet, in our actions and in our thinking, we have accused God of having such characteristics, because that’s exactly what some of us do.

We refuse to work on our relationship skills and so we simply say that person’s season is over. Thanks for the “get out of jail free” card God.

The Bible says that a friend loves at all times. In other words, no matter what “season” we go through in our lives, a true friend will never leave. The Bible tells us that if we go to offer our gift and we know that a brother has something against us, we must leave our gift to the altar and go and make it right.

There are so many scriptures that talk about preserving relationships, that I wonder how it became so easy for Christians to take this teaching on “seasons” and adapt it as their right to discard relationships and people on a whim and have no problems with it.

Again, it goes back to many people’s inability to function in successful human interactions.

What’s even more interesting is the fact that when these people cut someone off, claiming their season is past, they never have anything to do with that person again. Ironically, in the natural, seasons may past, but they always come back around the next year.

Yet when we claim someone’s season is finished in our lives, we want nothing to do with them ever again and we would avoid them if we saw them on the streets.

Am I suggesting that there are never instances where people come into our lives for a certain period and time of our lives and then leave afterwards? Yes, that happens. People come into our lives, or we are brought into other people’s lives for a particular time and for a particular purpose. Not every relationship will end in friendship. Not everyone who come into our lives will be our friends.

One of the biggest problems we have is we use the word “friend” too loosely and we are too quick to slap it on a relationship with someone we hardly know and the moment we find out that person does not have the qualities we consider for friendship we tell them their season is up.

Sometimes people come into our lives as mentors, to give advice, to encourage us or to simply be a financial blessing to us. And for the most part, these “relationships” end amicably. Both of you would know this is not a long term relationship and there would be no offence involved. We will not be trying to avoid the person when we see them walking down the street, because we would not have just cut off the person without an explanation.

Yes, we meet people on a regular basis and not all of them are going to make it into our inner circle. But we have to be aware of that and not throw everyone we meet into that inner circle and then when that person, who was not supposed to be there in the first place, wants to get out, we ostracize him and give him a bad name. And the easiest way to get out of that situation without looking like a fool is to claim that person was only in the inner circle for a “season”.

The main issue is too many of us ruin long-time friendships and relationships because we refuse to work out whatever problem comes up in the relationship. Or maybe because we just don’t know how to work out problems in relationships. But unfortunately, we are too quick to put a spiritual twist on things and believe that people only come into our lives to be used and only for a certain season.

How many life-long and possible life-long relationships are destroyed because of it? I don’t think for a moment that God takes such a shallow, pathetic view of relationships. So why should we?