Spring Again

For the first time in a long time, I feel a joyful, bubbling well of hope. The sun will do that. So will rest. (Eleven hours of sleep, y'all. No nightmares. No 5:30 am neediness. This morning I was replaced with an iPad, a Netflix app, and a bag of oranges. And I'm good with that.)

The sun warms my shoulders as I rake away the last of the soggy, brown leaves from the front yard. Down the street I hear the shouts and laughter of my little boy and his friends playing pickup basketball. My daughter is driving home from softball practice while her daddy teaches/encourages/warns from the passenger seat.

After a long, cold winter, it's beginning to feel like spring.

I discovered some things about myself this winter. I don't like to feel stuck in the cold. And I can be kind of whiny and frustrated about feeling stuck in the cold. It's easy to feel a little bit hopeless. Always winter and never Christmas. I have a tendency to look around at warmer places like, say, Florida. "It's not cold in FLORIDA. What do we need to do to warm things up around HERE?" I tend to seek validation that yes, it really is cold. (Read: you are not crazy - a wind chill of negative 10 can freeze even the most even-tempered personality). And I also seem to have a deep need to warm things up. Seriously, what's it going to take? I'll move south, I'll shift the jet stream, I'll even start a fire in the living room if I need to. What do I have to DO?

Too much snow. Make it go away.

I discovered some things about God this winter. Sometimes He lets us stay stuck in the cold for a season. I had several opportunities to "move" somewhere that seemed a lot warmer. The grass looks a lot greener when it's not covered in six inches of snow, y'all. But each time God said, "No. Wait. I know it's cold, but take heart. I will overcome the cold." They say Aslan is on the move. I'm not always good at figuring out what God is doing/is going to do and/or whether I'm going to like whatever it is. But when God says wait, when He promises that spring is coming EVENTUALLY, I am learning to trust that He who enters the storehouses of snow can also make the sun stand still in the sky.

I discovered some things about the support of friends this winter. A listening ear feels a lot like that NorthFace parka I'm coveting. It buffers against the icy wind. It may not make the cold go away, but it makes it a lot more tolerable. And sometimes, sometimes, enough friends working together with God CAN shift the jet stream, CAN melt the snow, CAN make you believe that we shall have spring again.

And now I'm off to enjoy more teenage driving, more little boy basketball, more sun on my shoulders. Because while we may yet have another cold snap before winter truly releases its grip, today it feels like spring.

This year spring came on February 20. A day of new beginnings…