Spring is Here (Part 2)

The snow has melted, and the earth lies cold and bare.  Birds hop excitedly on the newly thawed earth, and their melody, a new song, is carried through the breeze.  The bravest stems slowly venture through the leaves on the ground, and met with the warmth of the sun, begin to open their leaves.  The trees begin to form buds, and the whole earth awakens from it's long slumber.  The death of winter is forgotten, and all things are made new.


Spring is here.

The transition between winter and spring is a moment of awakening.  Rubbing your eyes, you sit up and survey your surroundings.  As the blurry world comes into focus, you are painfully aware of how different the scenery has become.  You see the life that has died, and briefly panic at what's been lost.  You wonder if things will ever be the same, and curse yourself for not being able to stop the winter from coming.   As the sun shines down, though, revealing the colors of spring, it also brings new clarity to what has happened.

There have been times when I would look back at the person I was before my season of depression and feel a sense of loss.  I had even gotten into the habit of telling my husband "if you could only see me then, I was such a better person".  But as this new season of spring begins to lighten my heart, and new buds begin to blossom in me, I see that it wasn't the best of me that died in that season.  It wasn't the joy, and it wasn't the peace that died.  Nor the patience, nor the kindness.  It couldn't be any of these things that died, because these were not fruits of myself, born of seeds that I planted in my own life.   These are fruits that have an endless supply from the outpouring of God's Spirit. 

Neither was it my salvation that died.  As the tree remains grounded with it's roots running deep, untouched by the winter, so my foundation built on Christ alone continues to stands firm.

As I start to take inventory of my mind and spirit, I realize that all that has been lost is any hope that I had in myself.  Any ability I had to feed my own spirit, any confidence in myself and in my accomplishments, has died and fluttered to the ground like leaves that feed a tree.  All that remained in the dead of winter, all that I had to stand on was my foundation in Christ, and His word stored in my heart.

And I realize this is what God intended winter to do.  To kill the facade.

In the very first stages of Spring, new life slowly emerges in us, and we step cautiously just in case winter decides to return.  The longer we are exposed to the warmth of the sun, however, the more comfortable we become.  As we forget the darkness, we begin to freely bloom and blossom in the light.  One morning we wake up, and the entire Earth is covered in green, brushed with flowers of  brilliant colors. 

As we begin to notice how beautiful we have become, adorned in fruits of the Spirit, we can quickly become arrogant.  We start to believe that somehow it was our own cultivation that created this life.  We fool ourselves into thinking that the sweet fragrance of the Holy Spirit is actually emanating from within ourselves.  We assure ourselves that we are not being prideful, saying things like "I am confident in who I am in Christ", and "I am wonderfully and beautifully made".  Peeking into the neighbor's garden, uncultivated and covered in weeds and dead brush, we turn our noses up and secretly commend ourselves for being stronger than that, strong enough to survive the winter.  On the outside, we give God the credit, but deep on the inside we start to believe in our own strength.  We hardly notice as the thorns of pride and the weeds of self-assurance start to entangle themselves in our lives. 

Winter becomes a distant memory, and we start to forget how desperately we cried in the darkness, when the freezing cold paralyzed us.  We forget the Name that we so humbly pleaded for when we awoke in a devastated garden.  We forget the Gardener who answered our call and rushed over to pull the weeds and clear the brush, the Sun who fed and nourished our starving hearts, and the Water who satisfied our dry and thirsty lips. 

Without winter, we would have no reason to rejoice in the spring.  But without the Gardener, spring only brings a garden suffocating in the remnants of death devastation from winter.  As we mature, we begin to recognize the piercing of thorns and the suffocation of weeds, and we call the Gardener to pull them immediately.  Eventually, springtime becomes longer, and winter seldom comes.   

Winter is necessary, but Springtime is beautiful. 

New leaves are beginning to open up in me, and everyday I find a newly formed bud, waiting to blossom.  I breathe in deeply the sweet, familiar fragrance of the Holy Spirit, and I could stand in the warmth of the sun for days.  I am being made new for the seasons to come.  I am not the same person I was before, but I am walking closer to the same God who was, and is, and is to come. 

Spring Is Here (Part 1)

I think it is completely appropriate that my last few blogs have gone from discussing winter, to waking up, and now that it is April, spring is here.  I can hear the birds chirping outside my window.  The trees sway in the breeze, the garden is starting to bloom, and walking down my road the sweet smell of the flowers is overwhelmingly pleasant.  Being outside is completely uplifting to the soul.

We have been to a lot of places, and experienced a lot of seasons in the last few years.  Texas summers were HOT.  I mean ridiculously hot.  The kind of hot that can make you crabby, and keep you feeling in a constant state of desperately needing a shower.  In the fall of 2011 we moved to Alaska.  Autumn in Alaska is gorgeous.  The breeze is cool, everything smells like pumpkins, and the leaves won't. stop. falling.  Alaskan winters are breathtakingly beautiful.  The scenery is majestic and it can leave you speechless.  But the winters are long.  Sometimes it can feel like the winter will never end.  The snow will never stop falling, and the leaves will never be fruitful again. 

Winter symbolizes death. 

The fruit on the tree has been harvested, the leaves have died and fallen, and the tree stands bare and naked, appearing dead and fruitless.  The chill of the wind makes everything feel numb.  The earth is covered in white, and it seems like life has been stolen from everything.  The freeze makes things fragile, limbs crack and break helplessly.  The world accepts its burial under a blanket of snow.

We all look at trees in the winter and think in the epic battle of tree vs. winter freeze, Old Jack Frost has won and there the weak tree stands, stripped and battered.  What most people don't know (and normal people, unlike me, don't think about) is how a tree is able to resume life in the spring.  While most plants retreat in winter, even surrendering to death up to their roots and hiding in the warm ground, trees have an amazing defense mechanism enabling them to be completely exposed, yet survive.  The obvious chemical changes in a tree cause the leaves to turn brilliant colors and fall.  But the covert defenses of a tree are even more miraculous.  Without going into too much nerdy detail, the processes that occur on a cellular level go beyond what even science can recreate.  My point is, the tree didn't just take it.  Though it shut down the processes that make it fruitful and beautiful, it stayed in an active state of defense.  The tree was fully aware and fully prepared for what most of us fail to see in our own lives; seasons are inevitable.  You cannot escape it.

God gave us every season in our lives.  Let me repeat that.  GOD gave us every season.  I am not including mistakes that you made where you stepped out of God's will.  I am talking about seasons of struggle, seasons of pain, seasons of uncertainty where you have absolutely nothing to lean on but the promises of God.  Seasons when you feel absolutely frozen, fruitless and dead.  Seasons when you feel like you can't hold the weight of the ice and the snow that just won't stop falling.  Seasons when you feel like God left. 

Let me tell you that in those seasons of my life God was doing in me exactly what He designed in those trees.  He was building up my defenses.  His strength was becoming mine, and He was proving His faithfulness and omnipotence to me.

Let me pause and say that I didn't feel strong in those seasons.  I didn't feel God's strength, or God's faithfulness, or His omnipotence.  I didn't feel anything but dead and weak.  There were nights when all I could do was claim God's promises over and over again, fighting the fear and doubt that surrounded me.  Some nights all I could do was cry and pray, and cry and pray some more.  Some nights the only thing I could whisper was "Jesus".  Jesus.  Over and over, Jesus.  Nothing but God was stronger than what I was going through, and no one but God kept me.

Like a tree, I may have stopped producing fruit.  I may have shed all of the leaves, with all of the joy and brightness that made me look full and beautifully blessed.   I may have felt vulnerable, stripped, and cold like that tree, and when you saw me maybe you only saw death and defeat.  But God...

God was covertly setting up His defenses in my life.  While destruction knocked on my door, GOD had his Angels on guard behind it, keeping it shut tight.  Every time death begged God for my life, GOD said "no".  And when the enemy roared and lied to me about how my story was going to end, God was writing a new chapter entitled "Victory".