Facing Your Fall Season
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I wonder do the trees understand the fall process? Do they expect their leaves to change and die or do they have to figure it out in real-time? I’ve rarely expected the fall seasons of my life and unlike the trees, there have been many times I’ve tried to hold on to my leaves or have mourned their loss. My response has often made the process more traumatic but I am learning to let go.
How to Fall Gracefully
The fall seasons of my life are marked by detachment, declutter, and separation. These seasons have two extremes for me, either things fall away from me fairly unnoticed or I feel like they’re being snatched and a range of emotions ensue. But what determines my experience? My focus and my attachment. If I wasn’t holding tightly to it I’m not messed up about it being gone and if I didn’t see it as an important part of my future I wouldn’t care enough to fight for it, but if I did, it feels like it was snatched and I wasn’t ready to let it go. If we’re honest with ourselves, there are some things we just don’t plan on having to go on without and when we have to, sometimes we have a problem. We have to reconcile this so we can move forward. That brings me to my question for you. What has your permission to fall away from you and what are some things you’d rather die than lose?
What I See Clearly
Our fall seasons are motivated by love. Point. Blank. Period. Regardless of how it may feel, fight to see it that way. God told me in this season you will either fall away or fall toward me. There’s no in-between. God did what it took to be as close as possible to us. He literaly put His Spirit inside us. So our fall season is just an opportunity to choose Him back.
I know the connotation of death may seem a bit extreme but this has always been a game of life and death. There are some things either we’ll die to or die with. And we have to know those are the choices we struggle to let go. We have to look at our hands. What are we really holding on to and why?
Falling to Death
What makes the fall season challenging is that it requires you to die to yourself and that doesn’t feel good. Death is always extreme because it always transforms and afterward, it’s impossible to stay the same. It was in understanding how those I loved died that I understood how to die to myself.
When my Granny was in “active death” (that still sounds like such an oxymoron) the hospice nurse told us that sometimes when people are in this stage they can feel their organs shutting down and they fight against it. She recommended for us to go into my Granny’s room, rub her arm and tell her that it was ok for her to go. Although she no longer seemed conscious this was supposed to help ease the anxiety of her transition.
It seemed so weird then but so relevant now. Apparently, I am my Granny’s child because I have often done the same thing. I have fought transition and struggled to let go. Sometimes when it felt new or unnatural I would hold on to what was familiar even though I knew that place could no longer serve me. I avoided death. It didn’t stop the process but the burn of holding on caused me trauma and things had to be ripped from me.
The truth is there’s a time appointed for everything to die. Instead of fighting to hold on, we’ve got to sense the time we’re in so we can know what we’re meant to die to in this season. Otherwise, we might sabotage and hold onto the wrong thing.
So do you know what’s supposed to fall away in this season? Do you know what you’re meant to die to? God rarely leaves us oblivious. For me, there are two indicators that generally point me in the right direction.
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My emotions: When I think of the things I hope God doesn’t take and fear or anxiety comes, those are usually the things that need to be addressed. Fear always surrounds what needs to fall away.
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My purpose: The things that are threatening, distracting from, or complicating my pursuit or purpose are the things I need to let go of, not find a way to make them work. If I’m running toward God’s best for my life, anything that can’t hang with my pursuit needs to fall away.
There are seasons in life when God requires you to go all-in, where the cost of sacrifice and the level of effort and essence you have to give is more than ever before. Like the leaves, there are seasons in our life that require us to change and die. That is the cost of moving to the next level.
Here’s the main question? What in your life is worth dying for? Your destiny, the promises of God, growth, your relationship with God? Acknowledge the answer truthfully because in your fall season you’ll live it out. Think on this: Jesus thought you were worth dying for. Is He?
The benefit of the fall season is transformation but first, we have to let go. The fall season is meant to be an exchange but it’s torture to those who don’t recognize its value. Deep down we know it’s worth it and if we’re struggling with letting go, we’ve got to ask ourselves why.
Our Greatest Opponent
The tricky thing about the fall season is it can feel like things are falling apart. The vacant spaces scream at us that something is missing. It feels like the ground is crumbling beneath you but it’s an altered reality. Fall shows you the truth and presents a lie at the same time. You see just how dependant and out of control you are but have to fight the failure, lack, and loss you may see. It tries to make you believe the promise is in jeopardy and sets you up to do Feargabra. This math always equals loss no matter what we do. Here is the most common equation. If I lose X it means ____ will happen. Fill in the blank. What consequence have you attached to letting go? Say it out loud so you can see what you’re fighting so hard for. So often we fill the blank with the worst-case scenario. Is it even true?
What’s falling away is usually not the thing, but the fear of losing it. When we do Feargabra we see that we tied our destiny to this and our identity to that. Our peace here, our happiness there. Our beauty, validation, worth, success, fulfillment- we tie it to all of these things and God uses our fall season to detach us from false identities and the fear behind them. He offers us an exchange, fear for freedom but the choice is ours what we’ll hold to. Either we’ll let go of the lies we’ve been living on or the promises of God, but something will fall. You can’t hold on to both because the detachment process requires you to die to everything you should have never been alive to. So which will you let go of?
How do you know what you’ve let go of? These are two questions I ask myself?
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Has my fear changed? That’s one way to tell. Let your feeling be a compass. If I’ve let go of the lies then I begin fearing losing the thing I wanted less and fear missing God more. Your fear should evolve into a fear of God and letting go of Him should become the greatest concern. Peace should be increasing. If you’re not moving toward peace check your hands. You may have let go of the wrong thing.
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What direction does it take you? Am I moving closer to God or away from Him?
The basis of every fear is loss- loss of security, love, happiness, etc. The lie of fear is that if I let go we’ll never have it again and then we layer on top that the belief that this is the best we’ll ever have. But holding on doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to keep it. Sometimes it’s a sure-fire way to lose now and what you need in the future. So Let go. Exchange. Transform. That’s the promise of your fall season. You don’t have to fear what needs to die when God is the God of the resurrection. Whatever He allows to die He can bring back to life how and when He wants to. But we hesitate to let go because we don’t know what will happen.
God told me “I can’t do exceedingly and abundantly if you’re afraid of the unknown. How can I expand your capacity and blow your mind if you’re only willing to receive what you understand? You’re tying my hands.”
The truth is when we let go we don’t know what God will do with it but we have to trust it’ll be better than what we could do. The Bible says is if we lose our life we’ll save it but if we try to save it we’ll lose. We have to move with the confidence that what He promised will happen, even if we don’t know when. Know it’s fact and there’s nothing to fear. Can you do that? Or do you need the false security of knowing the plan? Follow where He leads and you’ll go further and faster than you could imagine. Remember the plan is not what makes living any more secure- the planner is.
Real-time Revelations
Right now there are two areas God is addressing in my fall season. I am letting go of people and perspectives and the fear attached to them. This hasn’t been easy. Some of my worst fears have come true and it’s in facing them I’ve found that there was no truth to the fear.
There was a time I was afraid of going all-in with God because I thought I would lose myself. That’s exactly what happened. Transformation is about losing yourself to become something new. The fall season can be terrifying or exciting. The unknown can either cripple or exhilarate you. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Falling Perspectives
This season is showing me how many of my perspectives are tied to desires and how often my desires are highjacked by fear. My desires are the linchpin. The fall season comes to change my perspective on them and as I see them differently, transformation happens. What’s the biggest desire right now God is addressing? Self-preservation. I love to feel safe and secure. My self-preservation comes in many forms but it is triggered when I feel out of control.
The fear in the falling process makes each of us run to our self-preservation solution. It is our knee-jerk reaction that makes us feel like we have the means to give ourselves what we want. It’s a self-created fantasy that we construct to appease our fear. Looking back in my life I see some of mine. At the time they made me feel more in control but they’re all destructive.
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Sometimes my fear would get triggered when I felt like God was making me grow too quickly and instead of leaning in more and surrendering my time, I held to feeling overwhelmed and my self-preservation solution was to avoid God. I would decide I needed time away. I wanted a break. I would say yes to God’s plan for my life but controlling the pace made me feel more in control. But the joke was on me because where God was trying to give me acceleration in choosing my self-preservation solution I instead chose delay.
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Here’s another example. I would get tired of being single so I would go find a relationship instead of waiting on who God sent. Yal know the moment you start getting tired somebody halfway decent shows up and make you think about giving them a try. You know they’re not it but you try to work with them just to avoid being alone- oh that’s just me again ok. So i would give the relationship a try but since it wasn’t God orchestrated I never quite felt safe unless I was desired and wanted. That was my self-preservation solution. Instead of letting go of my impatience and insecurity I sacrificed my identity and picked up sexual sin that I had to repent and lose an appetite for.
See there are no shortcuts to the promise. We need our fall season. The fall season is meant to show us the true root of our desires and purify our hearts. It shows us not only what we didn’t need but wanted, but also what we wanted our way. And more than that it shows us what we truly trust- God or our self-preservation solutions. In this season I’m learning to make God my self-preservation solution. For so long I’ve associated the feelings of being out of control, needy and desperate with negative experiences. These feelings were usually followed by being mishandled, taken advantage of, or hurt. Because these feelings were associated with negative experiences when I felt them in the process, I would resist not risk the outcome the feeling might bring. I would end up reacting to things that weren’t happening and fighting ghosts and phantom images of past experiences just so I could feel powerful but I’m changing my perspective on this. This is not that. Feeling out of control doesn’t mean that I’m powerless. Instead of trying to prove I have power, I will just run to my power source.
People Problems
It seemed like every time I was going through something the people I wanted to run to never answered the phone. And I would get so frustrated with them but I started to think- God is this you? Are you trying to tell me something? And He was. He was saying “Run to me. Make me your first option.” And He continued to close other doors until I did.
You have to realize when a well has run dry and when you’re trying to draw the right thing from the wrong place. God may be telling you to let go. Letting go doesn’t mean you no longer love that person. Release doesn’t always have to be an emotionally driven process (or an announcement on social media). But until you don’t have to be incentivized to let go God will trigger emotions to motivate you to release relationships- pain, sadness, anger, hurt, etc. When we don’t yet trust divine detachment these feelings come to show you it’s time to let go.
Every relationship that felt like it was changing and panicked or held on too long to when felt like it was slipping away is better now than it was then. Even though I didn’t know what it would become and I was scared to lose what I had when I let go every single one transformed into what they needed to be for me and the other person. So you can trust that God knows what He’s doing with you and them.
I have noticed two purposes for my fall season when it comes to relationships. Sometimes God is removing and other times He’s adjusting.
When it’s a removal job He’s eliminating my other options. He takes everything but the right things and removes the clutter so we can come to Him. Instead of being frustrated, we should be grateful that He clears a path for us to access Him better. If we do it right we see Him clearer. Hear Him better and find a new appreciation for His Presence. When He takes everything else it’s only to give us more of Him.
But when it’s an adjustment He’s not taking anything from me but He’s changing my perspective and adjusting my grip. He shows me how to hold people and desires more loosely so I’m not holding them in a certain way or confining them to a certain place simply because I’m scared if I relax I’ll lose them. When it’s a promise of God it doesn’t require a white knuckle grip.
The blessing of fall is a new vantage point, freedom in detaching and strengthening the right attachments, greater focus, clarity of understanding, etc. It’s a blessing of MORE. God will have us release good to give us great. So don’t fear letting go. And to be clear, holding on partially is not the same as letting go. Fully releasing something is the only way God has the freedom to transform it. Trust God with everything and everyone you love. If He is creating tension or distance let them go but hold onto the promise that God will take care of them and you. Some things fall away forever and some just for a season.
Current Mindset
I realize my fall season comes more frequently when I decide I need a break from God so my perspective is shifting. I know where that mindset leads and I don’t want it. I value my time with God and I want no days off. I am determined to die to every fear, desire, relationship, or perspective that may try to come between us. If it costs me distance or separation of any kind from Him it’s too expensive. Separation is the punishment of hell. Why would I choose to have any semblance of hell on earth? That’s insanity.
My goal is to live with open hands knowing that everything I need God will supply and anything He takes I never needed. I want to allow God to move things in and out of my life and not hold on to anything that’s not meant for this season.
I want more and I’m willing to die to get it. I no longer fear my fall season and in case you still do here’s a pep talk. You’ve tried this before. Whether it was leaving your security blanket, learning you didn’t need a night light, living past your first broken heart, you’ve let go before without knowing for sure how it would turn out. It didn’t kill the eternal you but what needed to die did. Your fall season won’t kill you, it will only make you better. Let go and see what God will do with it. I’m so excited for your future.
