Seasons of Life · Beyond FMF towards a Kingdom Mindset
"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens." (Ecclesiastes 3:1, NIV)
In March 2020, Covid-19 reached Uganda and movement stopped. Ebenezer stayed open. Nobody came. The waiting room I had spent five years filling was empty, and the phones would not stop ringing.
Suppliers called every day. Some who held my cheques kept banking them, even after I had asked them to wait. Around that time I had taken an unsecured loan on ruinous terms, and the lenders were ruthless. That loan was my fatal financial mistake. Then, in the first month of the pandemic, I was hospitalised. The clinic was left without me, and revenue fell by almost half.
A sentence on a couch
When I came out of hospital, I went to stay with my uncle Dr Innocent Karamagi, who runs a private practice in Kavule. He had looked out for me since our school days, and he helped me with the hospital bill. I stayed with him for about six weeks. I had come to the edge. I feared losing the business.
In the evenings we sat on a couch in his clinic's waiting room, watching television. One evening he said something I have never forgotten: "Do you know loans have an expiration date? They reach a point and end."
It was a eureka moment. Even that loan had an end date. The debt would end. The empty waiting room would end. One day I would be out of this season. From then on I started to breathe again.
If you are at the edge now, call someone today. Say it out loud to a person who can help.
Four seasons in one year
In Uganda we largely live by two seasons, the rains and the dry. But the four-season map helps, because naming your season tells you what the work is. Covid-19 put all four into one year at Ebenezer.
Winter was the empty clinic, the hospital bed and Kavule. The sentence did not change the season. It told me the season would end.
Spring came back home. Some patients were not sick enough for the government hospital, but too sick to stay at home. We turned the maternity wing into an isolation ward. And with help from my paternal aunties, I started a banana plantation in Muziza. In the middle of winter, I put something in the ground.
Summer was the long, intense middle. In the isolation ward we admitted over 70 patients. When a friend's mother came in very sick and my staff avoided her, a voice in me asked: what if that were your mother? I put on protective gear and treated her myself. After that my team gained confidence.
Autumn told the truth. Our baskets were heavy: after numbers had nearly halved, we reached record months of over 800 patients. But I thought the harvest would last for ever. I forgot that a good season has an expiration date as well. We expanded, and it was foolhardy, because it was just a season.
The lesson both ways
Every season has an expiration date. The hard ones end, and so do the good ones. You cannot skip the hard season, and you cannot treat any season as permanent.
Ask yourself: Am I learning and preparing, or acting and planting? Am I in the hard middle, or starting to see results? Then match the work to the season. In winter, rest, review and learn. In spring, plant one or two seeds with dates. In summer, run the daily systems and weed cash leaks early. In autumn, give thanks, study the numbers and steward what came in.
I still come back to that sentence in Kavule. Loans have an expiration date. So does every season.
This story is told in full in Principle 4 of my book, Beyond the Stethoscope, available from 10 November 2026. If you are in a hard season in your business, book a coaching session in our app: ebenezerclinic.org/coaching-booking.