Sitting by the window overlooking the sink in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, where it is nice and sunny, are a set of beautiful purple and pink Cyclamen. Cyclamen are gorgeous plants with vibrant flowering during fall, winter, and spring. When the hot and dry summer comes the flower goes dormant, appearing dead, throwing off leaf and flower. But actually the dormancy is the flower’s inherent strategy to adjust to the summer months. Similarly, this season of COVID-19 restriction has made us learn more about adjusting than we would like to know. Spouses are adjusting to one another, parents are adjusting to kids, kids are adjusting to schools, schools are adjusting to CDC guidelines, and on and on we go. Everyone is in a cycle of shifting.

Even spiritually, the way we are having to experience the Kingdom—at home, around the table, online, outside—at this very moment is relatable to the world around us. For many people that is a huge adjustment. And now people far from God can have multiple access points into our lives if we are mindfully generous with including others in these opportunities. Mindful and generous—with wisdom, of course—the necessary mindset. Some of us are still incredibly resistant to what God is doing in this season. We’re all learning to make adjustments unlike ever before. Now, after several months of restrictions, we seem to not be as hopeful as we once were—that things would return to normal, so to speak. Many organizations have made substantial adaptations for these times while the church appears, in some regards, stuck. Calcified and unwilling to evolve, unwilling to reform. I get it. Change is hard. “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less,” said one army general. Personally, I don’t think we have to necessarily like change. However, we do need to be aggressively open to what the Spirit is doing even in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes we just simply need to “throw off everything that hinders” and adjust like the Cyclamen to the summer months.

“…since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us…” — Hebrews 12:1