I have always been an observer of nature. It is part of my work as a farmer, but it is also part of how I understand the world.
While writing my book “Debunked by Nature,” one theme kept recurring. God has woven wisdom into the natural world. His patterns, rhythms, and order are visible if we pay attention. Nature is not random; it is steady and intentional. The more time I spend working the land, the more I see how much we are meant to learn from it.
That perspective has caused me to question some cultural habits we treat as unquestionable. One of those habits is the New Year’s resolution. Every year, people begin January with strict diets, new exercise routines, and long lists of self-improvement goals. There is an expectation that Jan. 1 marks the beginning of a new self and a new life.
But when I look at nature, nothing about that timing makes sense.
We are only 11 days into winter when the new year begins. Winter is not a time of striving or building. Winter is the season of slowing down. It is the time for inwardness, stillness, and warmth. Animals hibernate or reduce activity. Trees protect their energy and stand bare and quiet. Seeds are not sprouting or growing. They are resting unseen beneath the soil. The whole world seems to hold its breath through the cold and darkness.
Yet this is the moment when society expects us to do the opposite. We try to force growth during a season created for rest. When viewed through the lens of nature, the timing of New Year’s resolutions starts to feel disconnected from the very design God placed in creation.
If we followed nature instead of the calendar, our momentum would begin in spring. Spring is when everything wakes up. The world warms. The days lengthen. The body begins to shed the extra insulation and heaviness that served a purpose during winter. Energy becomes available again and motivation feels natural instead of forced. Life begins to move upward, outward, and forward.
Even our language reinforces this truth. The English word “spring” for the season comes directly from the idea of things springing up from the ground. Long before that word existed in its modern form, the season was called “lencten” in Old English. “Lencten” meant “the lengthening of days,” and it is what gave us the word “Lent.”
In those early centuries, the word spring did not refer to the season at all. It referred to the act of rising suddenly or the place where water sprang up from the earth. In about the 1400s and 1500s, people began using spring to name the season because that was when plants sprang up from the soil, water tables sprang with renewed force after winter, and the sun appeared to rise higher in the sky as daylight increased. The season was often described as “the springing time,” which eventually shortened to the single word “spring.”
The root of the word goes back even further to the Proto-Germanic verb “springaną,” which meant to burst forth, grow rapidly, leap, or jump. That root still gives life to many words and phrases we use today, including spring forward, a metal spring that bounces back, sprout, and sprung.
So not only does creation express renewal in spring, but the very language we speak also testifies that this is the season of rising, of beginning, and of becoming. Spring was once lent or lencten, the season of lengthening light. Over time, the meaning evolved, but the truth it described remained the same. Renewal belongs to spring.
Growing up in Ithaca, New York, taught me another layer of this. Winter there can stretch on with long periods of gray sky, damp cold, and early darkness. Seasonal depression was common among people I knew. Less sunlight meant lower mood and lower energy. Although I never felt that heaviness myself, I watched it affect the people I loved. With that in mind, it feels even stranger that we expect ourselves to overhaul our lives during the darkest and most inward time of the year.
So this year I will not be making New Year’s resolutions. I will honor winter. I will rest beside fires, read stories with my children, wrap myself in warmth, and allow stillness to do its slow and unhurried work. I will reflect, pray, and let the season be what it was created to be.
My commitments will come with Lent, which feels beautifully fitting now that I know that Lent was once the name for spring itself. Lent arrives at the edge of winter as the world begins preparing to rise again. It offers a sacred window in which to experiment with a new commitment long enough to feel its weight, yet short enough to discern whether it belongs to the rhythm of life in the long term. Every year, I give up coffee for Lent. Last year, I drank only raw milk and no food at all. I do not yet know what this year will require of me, but I trust that clarity will come when I reach that season because it feels aligned rather than forced.
I am convinced that when we mirror nature, we find more peace in our choices and more ease in our growth. God designed the world with purpose and harmony. The more closely we align with that design, the more grace we experience.
So here’s to a winter of rest, reflection, warmth, and quiet. And when the earth awakens and spring rises with sunlight and energy and new life, that is when we will rise with it.
