Ahh, remember the days when life’s seasons were so predictable, so clearly defined? Growing up on California’s central coast, life had only two seasons—school and summer vacation.

Here on Oregon’s high desert, as our sunny October bustled to a close, aspen leaves littered our lawn like golden medallions. Like we’d hit the nature lottery! But then, on November first, snow fell. Unannounced and off schedule, it dusted the local mule deer in ice crystals as they slept. Bitter cold sent me scrounging for thicker socks and the knit caps with pom-poms I stashed back in February. So much for my big bulb-planting plans.

Seems like there’s only one season you and I can count on: the one in which we savor a few hoped-for things, while straining to endure something else that didn’t go to plan.

If God has impressed anything on me in recent years, it’s this: seasons collide.

• Perhaps one child thrives, while the other deals with serious struggles.

• Or maybe after decades of marriage, you find yourself nursing the stabbing pain of betrayal in the same season your daughter gives birth to a bright-eyed baby girl.

• Or just as you’ve finally realized amazing success in your career, your spouse’s health takes a sudden turn.

Both are true: Life is beautiful, and life stinks. God is faithful, and all things will not be made well this side of heaven.

Facing such a dichotomy, where oh where can we root ourselves that feels secure? Can we make peace with our residence here at the corner of bitter and sweet?

Can we make peace with our residence here at the corner of bitter and sweet?

Mark Batterson flips the script, saying,

We live at the intersection of two theologies, two realities. The faithfulness of God is pursuing us from the past. The sovereignty of God is setting us up for the future. We live at the intersection of so far so God and the best is yet to come.

It’s true! How beautifully he describes our invitation to reside in God’s house today. This is the intersection where we dwell! Living in full view of both the Lord’s past faithfulness and his promised future.

At church today I worship from the back. From here I spy a friend lifting too-thin arms in praise, singing “God is so good, he’s so good to me.” The woman is young and lovely . . . and she has terminal cancer.

Several rows farther up, a friend of mine reeling from an unwanted divorce closes her eyes and lips the same words.

How sing? Why sing?

Blessed are those who dwell in God’s house,
Ever singing your praise!

-Psalm 84:4

Maybe like me, these women find that tasting words of praise on their tongues, whether or not they feel them, whether or not they want to, forces them to recall God’s faithfulness, their so far so God. Before we know it, praises arise . . . it can’t be helped. And we sense that maybe, just maybe, our story doesn’t end here. Jesus is always inviting us upward and onward to the better things he has ahead.

But can we really nestle deeper into God’s goodness, when life isn’t all good?

I find it’s easier to write about it than to do. Maybe we mistakenly think head knowledge will heal us. But acknowledging Jesus’ invitations to reside with him in peace isn’t the same as moving in.

Try reading the psalm again, this time subbing the word “stay” for dwell:

Blessed are those who stay in God’s house,
Ever singing your praise!”

-Psalm 84:4

“Dwell” here can also mean settle.

So then, happy are those who stay and settle in God’s house, nestling ever deeper into his love and his promises, and singing his praises.

Fall and winter continue to commingle here. The other morning, a freezing fog crept through, coating red leaves in countless ice crystals, reminding me that life is many things, all swirled together like two contrasting colors of Play-Doh.

Rest assured, this winter won’t be a carbon copy of the last. But depend upon it—it will come. Life won’t be perfectly tidy, and God will be perfectly trustworthy.

Hang in there, sweet friend. When seasons collide, he offers a hearth and a warming fire. From God’s house at the corner of bitter and sweet, we get a spectacular view of what’s to come.

Selah.