God Is Present in Seasons of Shedding

Sunlight coming through half-bare fall branches over a gravel road

There’s a stretch of road out past my house where the trees meet overhead all summer. Green tunnel, all of it. Then, when fall comes, it’s a skeleton. You can see the barn on the other side of the field, the one you drove past a hundred times and never knew was there.

That’s what a shedding season does. It doesn’t just take. It shows you what the leaves were hiding.

I know that’s easier to write in a blog post than it is to live on a Tuesday afternoon when your life is coming apart in your hands. So let me say the honest part first. Shedding hurts. When a marriage thins out, when the job ends, when the friend you’d have given a kidney to stops answering, when your body quits doing what it used to do, none of that feels like a natural process. It feels like being robbed.

The question underneath the question

When people sit down across from me in the middle of a season like this, the question is almost never the one they ask out loud. Out loud they ask what they should do next. What they’re actually asking is whether God left.

We don’t say it that plain because it feels like a failure of faith to say it. So it comes out sideways. “I just don’t feel connected to anything right now.” “I’ve been praying and it’s like talking to the ceiling.” “I know I should be grateful.”

You don’t have to perform anything with me. You can be furious. Job sat in ashes and scraped himself with a piece of broken pottery and said out loud that he wished he’d never been born, and God did not strike him down for it. The people in Scripture who wrestled the hardest are the ones who ended up with new names.

Shedding is not punishment

Here’s where a lot of us get stuck. We take the loss and we run it backward through our own behavior, looking for the cause. What did I do. What did I miss. If I’d been a better wife, a better mother, a better Christian, prayed harder, tithed more, stayed quieter.

A maple doesn’t drop its leaves because it sinned. It drops them because holding on through the winter would kill it. Every leaf is a place where water leaves the tree, and a tree that keeps all its leaves through a freeze has a thousand little open valves and no way to refill them. Letting go is the survival mechanism. It’s not the failure. It’s the design.

I’m not going to hand you a tidy theology of suffering. I don’t have one. I’ve sat with too many good people who got handed things nobody deserves. What I’ll tell you is that in my experience, God doesn’t seem to be in the business of preventing the fall as much as being in it with you.

Where presence actually shows up

Presence almost never shows up the way we ordered it. We want the voice, the sign, the sudden lifting. What I see instead, over and over, is presence that arrives in a form so plain you can miss it if you’re scanning the sky.

The neighbor who mowed your yard without asking. The song that came on at the exact right mile marker. The fact that you got out of bed today, which, if you knew what this week has cost you, is not a small thing. The friend who texted at 11pm when you were sitting in the dark doing the math on your life.

One of my favorite things to tell a client is that mental health is why there are colors in the rainbow. We’re not all built the same, and the way grace reaches you might look nothing like the way it reaches the woman two pews over. If you’ve been waiting for your experience of God to look like somebody else’s testimony, you may be standing in the middle of an answer and calling it silence.

What to actually do in the bare part

Honestly, not much, and that’s the hard instruction. Keep your body fed and watered, get sunlight on your face, and stop trying to force a conclusion. Your nervous system is running hot right now, and a hot nervous system will manufacture certainty because uncertainty feels dangerous. That’s why you keep making big decisions at midnight. Don’t. Almost nothing has to be decided this week.

Tell one safe person the true version. This doesn’t need to be the church-parking-lot version where you’re fine. The true one. If you can only manage one prayer, let it be the shortest honest one you’ve got. I’ve prayed “help” more times than I’ve prayed anything eloquent, and I don’t believe it was ever received as insufficient.

The barn on the other side of the field

Here’s what I keep coming back to. That barn was always there. Every single summer, while I was driving through the green tunnel thinking I could see just fine.

You are in a season where some things are coming loose. Some of them you’ll grieve for years, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise or rush you through it. You’re also going to start seeing some things you couldn’t see before. There are things about yourself and about who’s actually in your corner. Also, you will learn about what you were carrying that was never yours.

Baby steps. Progress over perfection. And if today all you did was keep breathing while the leaves came down, that counts, and I’d tell you so if you were sitting right here.

This is education, not therapy, and reading a blog post is not the same as having your own person in your corner. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you’re in Kentucky and you’d like to work together, you can reach me through Circle of Hope Counseling Services.

Big T Trauma, Little t Trauma, and Why Comparing Keeps You Stuck