Signs of Life

There's something about February in Wisconsin that just makes you want to crawl into a hole and sleep until spring. It's grey and dark and cold and just all consuming depressing. It's usually during February that I swear daily that we're leaving Madison for some promisingly warmer destination.

And then March rolls in, and suddenly everything shifts. I finally take down my red berry wreath before the returning birds have a chance to try to eat the colored styrofoam, and the sun returns, and even on days that it's still often chill to the bone cold, there's a faint, crisp smell of spring fresh in the air. It's a good, good time. And it reminds me that, although I swore off living in a midwestern state with extreme seasons just a few weeks ago, it really isn't so bad after all.

Today at church I sat and listened to a sermon about the Resurrection, the New Creation, and the present and future hope we have because of them both. And something about it all reached in and touched a part of my soul that at that very moment needed a little bit of restoration. As the pastor and some amazing photographic images reminded us, "the New Creation is not a distant dream...because of the Resurrection, the new world has already begun."

I needed to be reminded of this...this story of love where death gives way to life. It is so terribly difficult but truly imperative to remember, especially as we are about to draw in to this season of Lent, about the light that comes out of dark places.

As I sat there listening I thought about my friend Amy, whose dad is losing his battle with cancer. As spring sets in her struggles are all a little too familiar - the hospital bed in the living room and the morphine and the bed pans and the lurch in your stomach each time the phone rings. I think of my own mixed emotions around the coming of spring, paralleling the hope of new life with the reminder of a time of year implicitly connected to death, and my heart breaks for her. And for the pain of devastating loss.

And then I started to look around me at church, and my mind drifted from Amy to the woman who sat a few rows up from me, who I know is homeless but who doesn't want others to know in fear of being treated differently. To the man a few seats down from me, who just got some terribly disappointing work news. To the workers rallying at the Capitol literally one block away from where I was singing church hymns, afraid for their lives and families and their state. To the friend across the room, who sat with a hand rested on her pregnant belly - after three years of hopeless trying for a baby with nothing and now the sweet promise of new life within.

And I looked down at Adah, who sat happily in my arms, bouncing to the beat of the music and singing loudly along with exuberant "va va vahs." I thought of the symbolism of spring she is in my own life - of hope and wonder and amazement at all of the wonderful things that had somehow become mundane or expected to me over the years. I thought of the darkness she might have to endure in her life, and how I pray that even in that darkness she'll find her way to a hope in a God that gives her a peace that surpasses all understanding; a God who gives her the hope of an eternal spring.

The lyrics of the hymn rang in my ears "Hallelujah, hallelujah, glory be to our great God." And I thought, for all of the moments of winter and darkness and doubt, the signs of life around me are undeniable. Amidst the pain and the joy and the wonder and the struggles, I am overwhelmed by the sense of something bigger than myself. Of a God that turns the seasons and knows that sometimes the hope of spring is the only thing getting us through the long, desolate winter darkness.