It’s the shortest month of the year, sandwiched between resolution and celebration, January and March, winter and spring. No fanfare, no parades or pageants. Its name is a derivative from the Latin februum, meaning purification, invoked by the ancient Romans in their cleansing rituals. They believed one needed to cleanse oneself from the old year’s practices, activities, and sins in preparation for the new year.
Though this practice was a pagan religious ritual, during their Februalia festival, it serves to illustrate the annual alignment that February brings to our calendar. These carefully calibrated 28 or 29 days align our calendar with the Earth’s seasons. Without this alignment holidays would get out of sync. Crops would be planted at the wrong time. We would lose orientation trying to keep up with the changes. Everything we depend on for order would quietly unravel.
February exists not to be celebrated, but to correct. Not to be seen, but to serve. Sounds a lot like the most important seasons in our lives.
Seasons Have a Time and Purpose
To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1
After a life of abundance and loss, wisdom and foolishness, building and tearing down, Solomon clarified this wisdom: life moves in seasons, and every season carries a purpose. He wasn’t cynical, just humbly surrendering to human reality.
Generally, winter. spring, summer, and fall are distinctly identified, if only by the calendar, but Solomon didn’t say every season, or its purpose, would be obvious or easily identifiable. He didn’t claim we would feel productive, enthusiastic, or even inspired in a season or with its purpose. He simple stated that every season under heaven is an appointed time with a specific purpose. Though the season and its purpose may be invisible to us, its value is perfectly visible to God.
An alignment season is much like a waiting room or recovery room. It is a quiet stretching or healing after a loss. It is the non-glamorous restoration without a good story plot. Naturally we want to rush through it. Get it over with. We apologize for any perceived failings, wondering how far behind we have fallen. But Solomon would say: you are not behind. This is an on-time season with a purpose.
Seasons Have a Completion Date
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son. Galatians 4:4
when the fullness of time had come is a key Pauline thought. The Greek word is pleroma, meaning completeness, the moment when everything has completed its purpose. Paul brings all the conditions, necessary for the arrival of Christ, together in that phrase. The Roman road system that allowed the Gospel to travel, the Greek language providing universal communication, the Jewish expectation that prepared hearts to receive the Messiah. None of it was accidental. All of it was alignment for the divine season, time, and purpose.
God, we may conclude, has a master calendar, with a scheduled timetable, and prescribed purpose. He doesn’t act early. He doesn’t act late. He acts according to His plan, with every element falling into its place, quietly and intentionally.
This should reframe our perspective. What if the period you’re currently in isn’t a delay, but a decreed element in God’s plan? What if God is not withholding the next chapter, but aligning the last chapter to His will so that your new chapter will mean something in you, around you, and through you?
February doesn’t apologize for existing before spring. It simply aligns the calendar so that when spring arrives, planting can be done, rain can be received, cultivating can be done, and growth will occur.
Seasons Require Understanding
My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. John 7:6
Jesus said this to his own brothers, who were pressuring him to go public, tempting him to perform, to grasp the brass ring of power. His response is quiet and firm: my time has not yet come. Even the Son of God lived within His seasons, waiting, understanding the discipline of not yet.
If Jesus submitted to divine timing, how much more should we? His words to his brothers do not suggest passivity. Rather, Jesus was deeply committed to His “not yet” seasons, teaching, healing, preparing His disciples. But He refused to be coerced into action before the Father’s prescribed time had fully come.
Your February season is not an excuse to do nothing. It’s a call to do the right things, the quiet necessary things, preparing, correcting, and waiting until spring has fully arrived.
Seasons Require Humility
It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority.
Acts 1:7
As Jesus prepared to ascend, His disciples, freshly emboldened by the resurrection, wanted a timeline. When, Lord? How long? What’s next? And Jesus, gently but firmly redirected them. The times and seasons are under the Father’s authority and are not subject to human curiosity or human demand.
There is something both humbling and deeply comforting in this. Humbling, because it dismantles our need to figure everything out. Comforting, because it means the Father is keeping track, and is not surprised, not scrambling, not straggling.
The February season often requires us to release our grip on the calendar. We want to know when winter ends. We want a date, a deadline, a sign. But faith, is the active elements which reveal that our hope is based on a calendar we cannot see, designed by hands far more capable than our own.
Let the Season Achieve Its Purpose
February is essential to the seasons! Not for the significance of the shortest month. Not because it’s less exciting, but because it has a time and purpose. February provides an essential pause between freezing temperatures and spring’s thaw. It is the month for small, focused, essential alignments.
Perhaps you are in a February season right now. Perhaps you think it feels too short to matter or too long to bear. Perhaps you’re pleading for it to end, wondering if it ever will.
Solomon’s wisdom is for you: this is your time for this season, and it has a purpose to achieve in you (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Paul’s wisdom is that God is at work completing God’s purpose in you before He moves you to the next challenge (Galatians 4:4). The Lord’s example is the wisdom of practicing the sacred discipline of obeying the Father’s will (John 7:6). And understanding that the Father is in control, leaving nothing to chance (Acts 1:7).
Let your February season achieve its purpose. Alignment to God’s purpose is essential.
But wait, every four years February leaps to cover what precise, human effort, at its best, cannot achieve. And February’s leap is the witness of the Gospel. God’s grace is our twenty-ninth day. No amount of personal discipline, spiritual resolve, or faithful waiting fully achieves God’s purpose. Only His grace through Christ achieves it. It is not a reward for aligning in faith. It is His gift that makes true alignment achievable.
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9