“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” — Ecclesiastes 3:1
Autumn in Colorado. Fall has always been a breathtaking season there. It must be the ever-changing colors, the brilliant yellow of the aspen, the warm oranges and reds radiating from the forests, the deep blue of the sky. It is truly amazing. It’s the brisk morning air that makes you reach for a warm sweater and hot cup of coffee. What a season of constant change and new beauty to be seen every day.
What season are you in?
Fellow earth walker, what does your life look like right now? Read Ecclesiastes 3. It speaks of many seasons in life: birth and death, planting and harvesting, mourning and rejoicing. One thing is true. The trial is here today and gone the next. Our lives here on earth are all about walking with our unchanging, everlasting God while being thrown into relentless changes and dealing with, as Paul says, “light and temporary” trials.
We cling to our Rock as we watch the sands of time sift swiftly through the hourglass of our lives. We seek the face of our God Who Sees, as we catch mere glimpses of what our current situations are truly cultivating in our hearts and character. We trust in our worthy God as we realize there is not one thing among us that will ever remain the same in our lives. Not our family. Not our friends. Not our jobs. Not our churches.
Everything changes. Everything has a season. Nothing except God remains unshaken.
The Leader in Every Season
If you’ve been in leadership for any length of time, you’ve experienced all four seasons. Maybe not in the order you expected. Maybe not with the spacing you would have chosen. But you’ve been through them. And the uncomfortable truth is that you’ll go through them again.
What makes leadership uniquely challenging is that the seasons of your organization and the seasons of your soul don’t always match. You might be leading a church through a season of exciting growth while your own heart is in the dead of winter. You might be in a personal spring, feeling the stirrings of new vision and fresh passion, while your team is enduring the relentless heat of a hard summer. And you’re expected to lead faithfully through all of it, regardless of what’s happening inside you.
I’ve walked with leaders who were in two completely different seasons at the same time and didn’t know how to reconcile them. They felt guilty for struggling personally during a season of organizational blessing. Or they felt confused about why they had so much inner peace during what looked like an external disaster. The reality is that God works in seasons, and He’s not limited to putting your personal season and your leadership season on the same calendar.
The question isn’t which season you’re in. The question is whether you’re trusting the One who controls the calendar.
Winter: The Bitter Cold
Is it the bitter cold and loneliness of winter, where you need the heat of your Consuming Fire to fill your soul again?
Leadership winter is the season nobody prepares you for. It’s the season where the vision feels dead, the relationships feel distant, and the motivation that used to carry you through long days has simply evaporated. Nothing is growing. Nothing seems to be producing fruit. And the cold has a way of making you wonder if spring will ever come.
For many leaders, winter is the season they fear most. Not because the work stops, but because the feeling stops. The joy that used to accompany the calling goes quiet. The sense of God’s nearness that sustained you through previous challenges seems absent. And in that silence, every doubt you’ve ever had about your calling, your effectiveness, and your worth comes rushing in.
But here’s what winter does that no other season can: it forces everything underground. The roots go deeper. The tree looks dead from the outside, but the life is being driven downward, into places it never would have reached in more comfortable seasons. The leaders I’ve known who have the deepest roots are the ones who endured the longest winters. Not because the winter was good. But because they let God use it to anchor them in ways that mild weather never could.
Spring: The Stirring
Has spring arrived in your heart, where you are feeling the stirrings of the Spirit in your soul, drawing you each day closer to your loving Lord?
Spring in leadership is the season of hope. New ideas start to surface. New energy begins to return. Relationships that felt cold start to warm. And there’s a sense, sometimes faint, sometimes overwhelming, that God is doing something new. You can feel it before you can name it.
The danger of spring for leaders is impatience. When you’ve been through a long winter, the first sign of warmth makes you want to sprint. You want to launch, build, grow, move, plant everything all at once. But spring isn’t summer. The ground isn’t fully ready yet. The shoots are tender. If you push too hard too fast, you’ll crush what’s just beginning to grow.
The best leaders in spring do something counterintuitive: they stay attentive without rushing. They notice what God is stirring without demanding it bloom on their timeline. They nurture the new thing instead of exploiting it. And they trust that the stirring is evidence of a faithful God who is preparing them for what’s ahead.
Summer: The Refiner’s Fire
Perhaps it is a season of summer, and you are enduring the relentless heat of what seems to be a never-ending Refiner’s fire, pulling out the impurities in your life seen only by a most Holy God.
Leadership summer is the season of intense heat. It’s the season where the fire doesn’t let up, where the pressure is constant, and where you’re being refined whether you asked for it or not. This is the season of hard conversations, tough decisions, and the kind of growth that only comes through suffering.
Summer doesn’t feel productive the way spring and fall do. It feels like endurance. It feels like survival. You wake up and face the heat again, and you wonder if this is the day it will break. But it doesn’t. And the next day it’s still there. And the next.
What God is doing in the summer is work that can only be accomplished under heat. He’s burning away the things that would weaken your leadership long-term. The pride that looks like confidence. The people-pleasing that looks like pastoral care. The shortcuts that look like efficiency. Those impurities are invisible in comfortable seasons. But under the heat of summer, they surface. And God, in His faithfulness, removes them so that what remains is pure and strong and trustworthy.
The hardest thing about summer is that you can’t rush it. You can only submit to it. But the leaders who endure the Refiner’s fire come out with a credibility and a depth that no amount of education or experience could produce. They’ve been tested. And they held.
Fall: The Season of Change
Or maybe it’s fall. A season of change.
Leadership fall is the season of transition. Things are shifting. What was is giving way to what will be. It’s beautiful, but it’s also disorienting. The colors are stunning, but they’re the colors of things letting go. Leaves that were once green and full of life are releasing their grip and drifting to the ground.
For leaders, fall often comes in the form of transitions. A staff change. A shift in vision. A new chapter that requires you to release what you’ve been holding onto. It might be a ministry season coming to an end. It might be a leadership role being handed off. It might be a relationship that’s changing in ways you didn’t plan for.
The beauty of fall is that it makes room. You can’t have new growth without releasing the old. And the leader who fights the fall, who clings to every leaf because letting go feels like losing, will never experience the new spring that God is preparing on the other side.
Whatever has come your way has come through the hand of God, and He can be trusted to bring you out of the season stronger and wiser than ever before.
The Unchanging God in Changing Seasons
His love is perfect and unfailing. His forgiveness and mercies are new every morning as we come to Him, confessing our failures and seeking His wisdom and His ways. He is our Comforter and Friend when the world falls apart around us, our Savior and Redeemer to pick us up when we have fallen on our faces in the muck of our own making. He is so faithful to us, even when we are so unfaithful to Him. He is our Provider, meeting all our needs through the richness of grace found in Christ.
That paragraph isn’t a list of theological attributes. It’s a lifeline for the leader in every season. In winter, He is the Consuming Fire. In spring, He is the one doing the stirring. In summer, He is the Refiner who loves you enough to remove what would destroy you. In fall, He is the faithful God who makes all things new.
The leader who anchors to an unchanging God can navigate any season. Not because the season is easy, but because the anchor holds. Not because you understand what God is doing, but because you trust who He is. And that trust isn’t built in one season. It’s built across all of them, cumulatively, as you walk with Him through the winters and the springs and the summers and the falls and discover each time that He is exactly who He said He was.
Know that your God loves you the most, and has only the best plan in store for you. He knows the very season you need right now to bring you closest to Him.
Next Steps for the Leader Navigating Their Current Season
Name your season honestly. Which one are you in right now? Not which one you wish you were in. Which one are you actually in? Winter, spring, summer, or fall? And are you fighting it, or are you letting God do what He wants to do in it? Naming the season is the first step toward navigating it well.
Stop comparing your season to someone else’s. One of the most destructive things a leader can do is look at another leader in a different season and assume something is wrong with their own. Their spring doesn’t mean you failed in your winter. Their harvest doesn’t invalidate your planting. God has each of you on a different calendar, and comparing seasons will only produce discouragement or pride. Neither one helps.
Ask God what He’s cultivating. Every season is producing something in your heart and character. In winter, it might be deeper roots. In spring, it might be fresh vision. In summer, it might be purity. In fall, it might be the ability to release and trust. Ask God what He’s growing in you right now, and cooperate with it instead of resisting it.
Lead your team according to their season, not just yours. Your team may be in a completely different season than you are. Pay attention. The person who seems disengaged might be in a personal winter. The one who’s bursting with ideas might be in a spring. The one who’s exhausted might be enduring summer’s heat. Lead them where they are, not where you are. That’s what a faithful shepherd does.
Cling, seek, and trust. In every season, the response is the same. Cling to your Rock. Seek the face of your God Who Sees. Trust in your worthy God. Those three postures will carry you through any season and prepare you for the next one. They’re not seasonal strategies. They’re lifetime anchors.
So I say enjoy the season with your everlasting God. Allow Him to reveal more of Himself to you, that you may know Him greater and love Him deeper.
Every season is temporary. But the God who walks with you through each one is eternal.