4 Surprising Ways God Reveals His Heart Through a Long, Hard Winter

Key Takeaways: 

• God designed winter intentionally. He created this season for rest, reflection, and deep inner growth. 

• Discomfort plays an important role in producing fruit. Spiritual and emotional winters strengthen your faith and character for a rich harvest. 

• Dependence on God deepens in winter. Fewer distractions and more quiet reveal our need for Him. 

• Maturity over comfort. God uses winter seasons to develop gratitude, trust, perseverance, and a model for your family. 

• Practical application: the virtual Jesus challenge provides an easy structure to help you embrace God’s design for your winter. 

Today, we’re tackling the impossible: reframing the cold, gloomy drearies of winter.

That’s right! 🤯 By the end of this blog, I think we might actually open your heart to appreciating winter; just a crack. 

I know it sounds crazy. 😅

Especially right after you watched the last warm days fade and that familiar winter heaviness settles in. Summer fun is over. The trees are bare, sidewalks icy, and the sun disappears before you even go outside. Getting out of bed and living your life feels 100x harder than it did in sunny, bright summer. 

You just SPRINTED from August to December, reeling with school calendars, emotional overload, holiday plans, spiritual fatigue, etc. The tiny bits of margin you managed to salvage are already swallowed up by your own neglected needs left sitting on the back burner for too long. 

This is a pretty familiar scene for most of us. 

So why does God even allow winter? 🤔 Is it just something to survive until the spring light returns? 

👉 What if He designed this dark, cold season intentionally? 

To reveal another side of Himself to you? 

To invite you into rest? 

To tend to your soul’s best interest? 

If we bulldoze through it as fast as possible, trying to get to the comfort of spring and light, we miss God’s beautiful, unique revelations tucked into the cold and the quiet. 

So let’s talk about four ways God specifically uses winter to reveal His heart and invite you into His BEST. I’ll show you some practical ways to embrace this season and experience Him fully, even in the darkest days of the year. 👇

#1: God Wants You To Rest 

Winter looks dead. Kind of like how you might feel walking into January. 

Tired. 

Poured out. 

Spiritually “blah.” 

No leaves, no flowers, no grass, little sign of life. Winter appears dormant and fruitless. 

But in reality, winter provides the deepest root work nature ever goes through. While it looks dead and useless, God designed this season for intentional rest. During this time, nature quietly prepares for new growth to burst forth in spring, bigger and brighter than the spring before. 🌾

Just as the earth lies dormant in winter, God built a natural rhythm of rest into creation and our own physical, spiritual, and emotional lives. 

But here’s the tricky part. 

As Christians, we often feel guilty for resting. 😬 As if the holier we are, the more exhausted we should be. Somewhere along the way, we discreetly labeled rest as “lazy,” “fruitless,” or “useless.” (As though we think we can redefine God’s intentions. Yikes.) 

🚨 In reality, God considers rest an act of obedience and is deeply PLEASED when you rest! Read more about God’s command to rest here. 

God intentionally designed winter with shorter days, less light, and fewer opportunities for activities or work. While we groan and roll our eyes at these “limitations,” God did not make a mistake. He set these limits for our good, to invite His children into beyond-surface-level rest and recovery. 

Just like creation withdraws from production in winter, your soul needs the same strengthening to sustain the fruitful seasons ahead. 🌱

Our most valuable spiritual and personal growth happens quietly, privately. Before the visibility, before the fanfare of new fruit. 

This is especially true in the trenches of real life. Wherever you are, whether managing a child’s mood swings or learning to do life without a loved one, this winter is God’s wide-open invitation to you to come and rest. 

🤲 Come and lay your burdens down at His feet. 

🤲 Embrace nature’s stillness to hear His voice clearly. 

🤲 Steady your thoughts, emotions, and activities in His Word. 

🤲 Refill your tank with slow rhythms of winter evenings. 

Oh friend, doesn’t that sound like such a relief, especially when you’ve been running on empty for months? To unload the exhaustion and withdraw into a time of resting and recovering? 

 

Winter is not a season to survive or “get through.” It's God’s gift to you! 

Use these early nights and chilly days to give your soul the greatest healing and rest you will ever receive: a good long soak in God’s Word in a way you normally feel too rushed for. 🥹

#2: God Uses Discomfort For Your Growth 

We resist discomfort, but God never wastes it. Cold winter rolls around every year, without fail. And sometimes God brings us into a season of spiritual winter, too. ❄️

This winter season is inconvenient, messy, dark, and unpredictable. We might feel unsettled and frustrated by it, but God isn’t afraid of our discomfort. We avoid it like the plague, but He recognizes its immense value in our maturity and development. 

Don’t get me wrong; God’s Father's heart aches with you when you’re suffering or in pain. He feels the weight of it WITH you, weeps with you, understands the depths of your ache. 🫶

But He is too devoted to you to let discomfort stop you short of His Best for you. And what is that “Best?” To be conformed to the image of His Son. 

1 Peter 1:6-7 says: 

“So be truly glad! There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.” 

 

Friend, if you’re in a dark winter of the soul right now, I know everything in you is begging for spring. You want out. You want relief. That’s so normal and natural, and I’ve been there too. 🥺

But God isn’t surprised by this season, and He’s already elbows deep, working in it for your good. I want to lovingly encourage and challenge you to LEAN IN. 🧎 God will not let you fall beyond reach! 

🚨 At this very moment, He is right in the middle of the miracle: transforming you into the likeness of Jesus Christ. 

Right now, when everything feels so tense and hard and dark, abandon yourself to God’s careful hand and give up all control over the outcome. He will not fail you. He’s 100% invested in your Greatest Good. 

Countless mature believers talk about God’s goodness through seasons like this. You can see God’s loving hand and devotion in Bible stories about Moses, Elijah, Paul, and even Jesus. 

This uncomfortable, dreary winter is one of God’s favorite tools to strengthen His children and fine-tune us to His purposes. The discomfort you experience is vital preparation for a greater, deeper purpose and calling. 

And there will be a day when the long darkness breaks (it's coming, I promise!), and you’ll suddenly be standing in a strength and maturity you didn’t see forming in the dark. You can’t help but gasp in wonder at the vibrant, rich beauty God produced through your winter. 💐

#3: God Invites You to be Honest and Dependent 

Winter brings with it long, dark days and nights. Honestly, a lot more darkness than we like. In addition to physical darkness, winter often leads us to face inner darkness as well. 

God uses winter to strip away many of our fun summer distractions and reveal core realities we like to keep hidden. Because of this, many of us hit an emotional wall or come face to face with seasonal depression and sadness. 😣

Other struggles can include: 

• Dealing with the emotional load of raising kids 

• Caring for aging parents 

• Spiritual emptiness that shows up when you slow down 

• Loneliness, often unacknowledged 

• Exhaustion 

• Tension in your marriage 

• Unfulfilled longings 

• Anxiety 

Winter strips away the distractions we use to ignore these struggles, and suddenly we see our own hearts and struggles more clearly. 🫣 We realize how dependent on the Lord we must be to heal. 

This dependence is NOT a sign of weakness. It’s the opposite! It’s the EXACT place where God wants to meet you and sustain you with His unconditional love and power. He loves when we come to Him with nothing of ourselves. He longs to bind up your heart and your aches and your wounds, and set you back on your feet strengthened by His love and promises. 

Winter may reveal parts of yourself you’ve been afraid to face. Instead of hunkering down and just trying to survive until distraction season again, I encourage you to bring the real, messy pieces before the Lord. He will meet you there to heal the root of your brokenness and struggle. And that can only be done when the darkness is fully revealed. 🔦

This experience of coming to Him with an empty-handed, broken life can be very humbling. But it is a true representation of our hopeless state without Him. We have NOTHING good to bring Him in our flesh. ALL the good in us comes from Him! 

So as winter exposes the things you prefer to hide, don’t shy away. As you bring them to the Lord and He heals you, He’s doing the deep, winter work in you to produce a brighter, richer spring ahead. 🌱

#4: God is After Your Maturity, Not Your Comfort 

Most of us LOVE summer! The freedom to be outdoors longer, warm summer evenings, sunshine almost constantly, pretty blooms, vacations, etc. Who would say no to that?? 

We tolerate winter. Kind of. 😒

But isn’t it true that God is just as thrilled with His quiet winter creation as He is with summer? 

Few people appreciate the realities of winter: snow, cold, darkness, discomfort, high electric bills. No, we crave the fruit and the harvest of summer, both physically and spiritually. Things like:

• Emotional resilience 

• Spiritual depth 

• Consistency 

• Peace 

• Patience with your teens 

• Confidence you’re building an excellent legacy in your family

Just like you want to raise grounded, resilient children, God wants to raise grounded, resilient adults. And just like your children need to build character in order to reach that goal, we need to practice our own character development to achieve the same. 

Winter develops traits that summer never can: 

• Practicing gratitude in hard, uncomfortable things 

• Worshipping whether you feel like it or not 

• Appreciating God’s work in your life when it’s messy and painful

• Trusting the Lord when you can’t see the outcome 

God uses winter to round us out spiritually, bringing us to greater maturity and appreciation of ALL He gives us, including the things that don’t “feel” good. 😉

And don't forget: the way YOU choose to engage with these winter challenges models to your children how to handle their own difficulties. 

So let me ask you, how do your kids see you handle winter? 

🗣️ Complaining about the inconvenience? 

🫣 Retreating from darkness instead of dealing with it? 

🥵 Neglecting rest and self-care?

🤲 Joyfully embracing a season of growth just like you embrace its fruit? 

Winter is the training ground that shapes the spiritual maturity you’ll pass down to your kids. Click here to read more about how your spiritual walk with God impacts your kids, home, and family culture. 

Practically Embracing God’s Design for Winter: The Virtual Jesus Challenge 

Winter is here, and yes, it already feels heavy. But I pray that as God reveals His heart to you, you might be a bit more open to experiencing winter through His design. To deeply invest in yourself and glean every bit of good from winter instead of just surviving it. 

As a busy parent and wife, I know you want to experience winter differently, but it’s overwhelming to know where to start. 🥵

I want to introduce you to the virtual Jesus challenge, a structured, simple habit to practice and apply the lessons you just learned about God’s heart for you during winter. 

It’s designed specifically to make winter an intentional, purposeful season, not just letting it “happen” to you. 

Here’s how the virtual Jesus challenge helps you experience God’s heart this winter: 👇

• Time to reset: The Jesus virtual challenge gives you 20 sacred minutes every day to step away from your busy schedule and replenish your soul with movement and refreshing time in Scripture. 

• Growth through discomfort: The virtual Jesus challenge keeps you accountable to walk or run 1 mile every day for 40 days, helping you move out of your comfort zone. 

• Dependence: By keeping you in God’s Word every day, the Jesus virtual challenge helps you reflect honestly and depend on the Lord to help you instead of distracting yourself. 

• Maturity: The virtual Jesus challenge provides a simple, practical tool for your entire family to develop consistency, discipline, and open up spiritual conversations. 

When you join the virtual Jesus challenge, you’ll get: 

• A daily walking routine to help keep stress, fatigue, and seasonal weight gain in check 

• Simple, pre-assigned Scripture passages to reduce your decision-making load 

• Daily breaks from home, deadlines, needs, and expectations 

• A friendly, supportive community walking alongside you to cheer you on and hold you accountable 

• Quiet, focused space to hear God speak clearly into your situation 

• Optional daily challenges to apply your Scripture reading to daily life 

🚨 This winter, you have a choice: grit your teeth and survive it like every year before, OR take simple, guided steps to embrace God’s beautiful, intentional design for this season. 

We’d love to have you join us for our New Years virtual Jesus challenge. Sign up below to claim your spot and make THIS the winter you double down on your walk with God. 💪 

Commit Now