I’m blessed to live in a part of the world where Spring charges in like a green tsunami, a sudden wave washing over winter’s barrenness with life bursting from every twig and field. So overwhelming is the change, that within a week we’re outside in the still-cool air, mowing and trimming and cutting the growth back from our yards and sidewalks, shooing deer from our flowerbeds, and bringing out the hummingbird feeders.

How amazing it is that the slightest tilt of our planet ushers in such an abundance of light, warmth, and growth.

We longed for this, didn’t we, holding our coffee by the fire when everything outside was frozen in a world of gray and white? In the months when darkness hedged the edges of our days in an ever-tightening circle?

We knew that Spring would come, because it always does. The world was created to display God’s glory through seasons, however slight their difference in some parts of the world. God sowed life into every inch of this planet, and nothing has been able to arrest it…yet.

Even in our cities the weeds push through sidewalks and the ants gather around a fallen crumb. In my area, hills of useless mine tailings from times past are now covered with pine and beech, populated with porcupines and foxes.

How, then, do we have such a faint trust in resurrection? How can we believe that death is the end, when all around us new life is bursting from old?

Our lives are like seeds, Jesus said, planted to rise. To thrive. An abundance of life and joy will come in the next season. But for now, we are called to lay ourselves down, like he did, for love. To be bread for the hungry and drink for the weary. To be a resurrection witness in all the ordinary places of our days.

Just a twinkle of an eye will usher in eternal spring one day, when all the trees of the field will clap their hands, and the very stones will shout for joy. We are ambassadors of the coming beauty, love’s story written in these bones that will one day behold their maker, whole.

Life’s astounding persistence will have its way in this world and in us one glorious day. Are you ready?

“Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

John 11:25-26