Spring Will Come

“Anna just puked again” read the text from my friend, Jo, who was up the entire night before with Anna who, in total, threw up 20 times and only stopped retching due to the modern, medical help of anti-nausea medicine.  This is the second time this winter the stomach virus has fallen upon my friend's home.

And, I know Jo’s experience is not an isolated one.

I have a Southern friend, Amy, who has fought to find activities to keep her two boys busy while they have waited out TEN days of cancelled school, called off due to snow and ice covered roads that Nashville is simply not equipped to handle.

As I write this post, my daughter lays on the kitchen banquette beside me, sniffing and just plain worn out from fighting some kind of sinus cold despite how diligent I have been to avoid sugar, get enough rest and  pump our bodies with all varieties of immune boosting supplements.

It is finally March, the month that spring officially arrives, but we have been ready for the end of winter for at least a month now. Yes?

I adopted a mantra to help keep me from complaining. That mantra is, "Spring will come."  I figured it has come every year; it will come again. Renewal, rejuvenation, rebirth. It will all come.

Yet, we endure winter in the midst of our longing for spring.

I think many of us are longing not just for a literal spring but also for a spiritual spring--a renewal, rejuvenation and rebirth of the soul.

The winter of this fallen earth is evident: 

      Headlines of heads being chopped off for refusing to embrace hate.

      Outbreaks of a disease that has been relatively contained for decades drawing dividing lines of hate between the vaxxer’s and “anti-vaxxers.” 

      Hate taking on the guise of love, attraction and romance in a book series turned movie that many flock to see.

Positive thinking only gets us so far, and it just does not erase these realities.  

I have thought, "OH, Jesus, how I LONG for spring....not just the spring that brings daffodils and daisies but the spring that brings YOU again, the spring that ushers in the new earth and new heaven, new bodies for those who are in Christ, the new Kingdom of His righteous reign."

Spring will come. It will.

There is something, rather someONE who will take us farther than self affirmations.  

There is someONE who will take all the wrongs of this world and one day make it right,

who will call all evil to account,

who will fully and finally shackle all that shackles us,

who will burst on the scene with more brilliance than any row of azaleas ever could display.

His name is Jesus.

And, he came to earth once. We celebrate His first coming at Christmas.
We are now looking forward to Easter when we remember Christ’s dying and rejoice at His resurrection because it assures us that death has been conquered, eternal life in Heaven with Him is possible, spring will come again.

What is in my heart and what I have tried to communicate in this post is perhaps more succinctly and poetically expressed in the lines taken from one of our family's favorite series, "The Chronicles of Narnia", 

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

We WILL have spring again.