New Venture

PC: Sarah Straeter Photography

Ever since I was a young kid, I had a passion for art, design and writing. When it comes to art, writing and design, I've experimented with just about every medium possible. Well, besides welding. And ice.

During the long winters in Indiana, between going to basketball games, sledding and riding the snowmobile through cornfields, you would find me holed up in my room at my parent's farmhouse coding websites, journaling and creating digital illustrations in Microsoft Paint.

After finishing college with a degree in General Studies with an emphasis on Graphic Design, I graduated from college during a horrible job economy. I had two choices. Take what I could find in the area or move away.

This Hoosier girl wasn't moving away.

In fact, I ended up 10 minutes from my parents on 120 acres in a barn house I designed, married to a farmer in a little river town without a zip code.

I always struggled with what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Job-wise, I took what I could get for the next several years as I did some free-lance design and writing work on the side. I've sold fasteners, worked in a retail, loaded trucks, wrote service tickets at an ag dealership, supervised a diesel shop and assisted at our county Chamber office.

One weekend I was going through my office at home and found some boxes from my old room at my parent's I hadn't touched in 12 years. Inside was a book called, The Meaning of Life, I was going to toss into the Goodwill pile.

But I hesitated.

New seasons. New support.

When one thinks of the seasons, they think of  Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. The seasons that dictate whether or not we wear a jacket or plant flowers.

Most of us don't realize that our lives also have seasons.

Our lives are made up of a series of seasons.

We may not have fun names for them like Spring or Summer and they may not appear on the exact same months on a calendar every year. The seasons of our lives are very tricky.

There is not a calendar for life. We don't know when our current season will change.

As human beings, we are impatient. We want things to happen now. We want what our neighbor wants. We get discouraged when we are not seeing results. Sometimes we are enjoying the season we are in, but annoying leaves start falling in our yard. Or it starts snowing.

When we become impatient, we start acting and thinking with our emotions. We take our emotions and we use them to beat ourselves up and sometimes we beat up others in the process. While we are busy beating ourselves up, we are missing the beauty of the season. In the fall, it might be getting chilly, but I sure do love the beautiful colors and I cherish every second. We do the same things with our lives.

In order to be happy with what we have and who we are, we need to come to terms with the current season of our lives. Your current season may not allow time for you to get to that home improvement project, your boss may not have the funds to give you that raise or it just may not be the right time for you to go back to school or there may be a person who just doesn't fit into your current season. As we wait for that next season, we have to adapt in our current environment - much like we must put on a coat in the winter to face the cooler weather or plant flowers in the spring when it's warm.

I think one of the hardest parts about facing a new season is realizing there may be some people in our lives who aren't experiencing the same weather you are. It's hard for us in Indiana to understand what those are going through in Florida with Hurricane Matthew as we bring in our corn and soybean harvest in the crisp, cool, gentle air.