Nobody Was Assigned to Your Winter
Almost everything that matters in your life has somebody or something watching it.
Your car has a warning light for the oil. Your phone reminds you about the dentist. The bank texts you when the balance gets low. At work there’s a person whose job is to notice if you stop showing up. We live inside a whole web of systems built to catch things before they get bad, and most of the time we don’t even think about them.
There’s also the thing in your life that has no system at all.
You already know what it is. It’s the one you’ve been meaning to deal with for a few years now. It never calls and it never dings, and it has never once interrupted a Tuesday to ask anything of you. So it just waits.
I’ve spent a lot of years sitting across the table from people, and this is usually what we end up talking about.
Proverbs has something to say about it, and it sends you, of all places, to a bug.
“Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.” (Proverbs 6:6-8, ESV)
Notice the ant doesn’t have a boss. There’s nobody standing over her telling her winter is coming and she’d better get moving. She looks ahead on her own, because she has figured out the thing most of us spend a lifetime avoiding. Nobody else is going to look ahead for her.
That’s true for you too. Whatever your version of this is, nobody has been assigned to it. Not your spouse, not your church, and not next year’s version of you, who you keep hoping will be more disciplined than you are right now. The job is open, it has your name on it, and it stays open until you take it.
Now, the reason the ant works matters as much as the work. She isn’t frantic. She’s not hoarding against a cruel world. She just does the ordinary thing in the summer so she can be at peace in the winter. That’s the difference between anxious hoarding and preparing, and we weren’t really ever taught to tell them apart. Fear says store it up, because the world is coming for you. Wisdom says tend it now, so you can be free later. Same action, completely different master.
And the person who has quietly prepared is almost always the most generous one in the room. They’re not bracing against a winter they’ve done nothing about, so it’s easier for them to give. Preparing for the future isn’t the opposite of a generous life. Most of the time it’s what frees you to live one.
So what’s the thing in your life that will never become urgent until it’s too late to fix easily?
For some it’s a conversation they keep not having. For others it’s an envelope in a drawer they haven’t opened, because opening it means finding out. Sometimes it’s a habit that’s been costing them quietly for a decade, or a body they keep promising to take care of later. You probably knew which one was yours before you finished that sentence. That’s usually how this works.
And there’s mercy in that, because the ant doesn’t gather the whole winter in an afternoon. She gathers. One small trip at a time, across a whole season, and it adds up to enough. You’re not being asked to fix the thing today. You’re being asked to stop pretending it’s going to handle itself.
So do one small thing this week. Put fifteen minutes on the calendar and treat it like an appointment you wouldn’t cancel on anybody else. Open the drawer, or make the call.
Nobody’s been assigned to your winter. But you’re not too late to it either.
A Prayer for Today
Lord, I’ve been waiting for something to make this urgent. Give me the courage to tend it before it becomes a crisis, and keep me from doing it out of fear. Let the preparing come from trust, not dread. Amen.
