Through the Winter and into Spring

by Joanna Thiede

Author’s note: This was written during the very height of a difficult situation in my life – it came from the center of a storm, you might say.  A tiny beam of light, breaking through the heavy, threatening clouds.

Spring — after teasing us with slightly scented breezes and almost-warm days — has arrived at last, in a dramatic sweep of color.  One day the trees were scraggly, brown and dead, the next day a splatter of brilliant green bathed the earth.  Every spring leaves me breathless with wonder and marvel as if I had never seen the miracle of it happen before.  Who doesn’t feel dizzy with joy when new life is bursting all around them?

But this year spring looks different.  It seems somehow disconnected from the pain I am feeling right now.  Never in my life has the world seemed so bleak, confusing and hopeless.  Surrounded by problems I can’t understand, wounded, and out-of-control, I am asking that eternal question, “WHY?!”  It doesn’t make sense!  How can the aching beauty and vivid joy I see all around me have any place in this time of my life?  The barrenness of winter seems more realistic.

And that’s when I realized the message of spring, the words that whisper in every budding tree: “Hang in there.  Through the pain, the cold, the bitterness of winter, hang in there.  The results are beautiful.”  Yes!  After night comes the dawn!  Death is a prelude to life!  When winter snows finally melt away spring spreads its banner of victory.  The hands of a loving Creator made it this way from the beginning of time.  The leaves that fall from the trees in autumn and rot into the ground furnish the fuel for new life in the spring.  Jesus, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross.  Joy was the ultimate end.

I do not like this ‘stripping away’, this barrenness of my soul.  But spring reminds me poignantly that it will not always be this way.  If I submit myself to the sovereign guiding of my King, this present death will nourish a more perfect and beautiful life than I can even imagine right now!  His love makes no mistakes.  The path that He has led me to surely has an expected end, and He in His infinite wisdom knows that I need every shudder of this pain to reach the beautiful results He has in mind.

“The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jeremiah 31:3).  How can I argue with that?  How can I ask ‘why?’ in the face of a Love that is written across the ages, a Love that will use whatever path it takes to draw me to Itself and enfold me in It’s warmth? And how did I manage to forget that awesome love for a single minute?!

People speak of spring as the beginning of the life cycle.  Life begins like springtime, reaches its summer-time peak and declines into the dead of winter.  But I think maybe springtime is the end, too, not just the beginning!  Hang in there!  The end is on the way.