Spring is inevitable
on building trust in the waiting
The minute the weather got warm, I got impatient. Spring is my very favorite season, and I luxuriated in the couple of 50- and 60-degree days we had here in New England this week, taking many jacket-less walks and eating lunch in the sunny spot on the front porch, all the while side-eyeing the huge piles of snow that just would not melt fast enough for my liking.
A message to the snow piles: don’t you know your time is over? Your flakes fell and fell and fell for far too long while we had no choice but to endure it. You kept us in our homes, created extra work for us to care for our neighbors and ourselves, made us depressed and angsty and far too attached to our phones for every tragic update. One day with you felt like forever, like time had stopped, but clearly, your shift is now (finally) over. Most everyone I know agrees that it’s time to turn the page, for real.1
What do we do with our impatience when it comes to the change we really need to see? For me, as I noticed myself taking daily pictures of the shrinking piles while singing melting songs of encouragement, I knew that my own internal buzzing was cause for some investigation. If I’m honest, sometimes I fear that the promised spring will never arrive. This ‘spring’ can take the form of justice triumphing over evil, the long-held prayers and promises, or the full-circle moments that bring much needed meaning from pain.
For people of faith, this means holding on through the dark for the promise of light and we do so much of this, don’t we? When all we see is snow, it can be hard to remember the reality that under the surface, spring (really) is forming. The flowers we will enjoy in just a few weeks are in process, right now, today, in a way we just can’t see yet. The power of the sun will melt every single bit of every single pile, and it will all be used for a purpose – that’s the promise. We’re likely to have greener grass, more flourishing plantings, and a more verdant spring than we’ve had in years, and we’ll have all this snow to thank for it. Knowing this, I can turn from my fear and impatience when I remember that God has a plan for it all.
Each day we’ll have a little more light, a little more melting, and a little more growth, both within us and around us, thanks be to God. Through it all, we can remember the faithfulness of a God who holds the time and our world in His kind hands. Because of Him, we can know it for sure: spring is inevitable.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11
Raised Catholic rewind:
Find 200 episodes of Raised Catholic on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for continuing to recommend these episodes to friends who might find them helpful on their journey.
Maybe this paragraph is not entirely about snow.