When Will Spring Arrive

WHEN WILL SPRING ARRIVE?    By Pastor Dorothy Wilcox

By the calendar, I think it should be Spring by now – warm, sunny days that greet the emerging crocuses, hyacinths, tulips, and daffodils.  Instead, the daily weather report still includes a wind-chill calculation and, too often, a prediction of snow!  Perhaps you’ve seen the map below “updated” to show the dark blue portion, where we live, simply labeled, “NEVER!”.  The head knows that can’t be true:  Spring will eventually come, but the heart wonders…

Lent is a bit like that.  We look toward the Resurrection with a sense of already/not yet.  Our head knows that it happened, two thousand years ago, but we are asked to wrap our heart around a deeper understanding of our current need, a recognition of our own sinfulness, an acceptance of our guilt.  We are afforded an opportunity to see the improbability of it all:  that a man was put to death as a criminal and buried in a borrowed tomb.  All that he had told us, promised us, now in question.  How could we ever have believed?  What sense does it make that his death could bring new life for each of us?  But we look with faith and hope toward the Resurrection, because we know that we can rely on all of God’s promises.

There is a new show on tv, and I must disclose that I have not seen it yet.  I observe that it is interesting that it debuted during Lent, though.  And the shocking premise is that someone you loved and knew to be dead is suddenly alive again.  Isn’t that what happened to Jesus’s followers?    Isn’t it what we say we expect for ourselves and for all believers?  Do we really believe that?  In our heads?  In our hearts?

 

Spring will surely come….any day now.  And even more surely, you are called to new life now and forever by the improbable and miraculous victory of Christ over sin and death on our behalf.  Because he lives, you shall live also!