• 

As I write this a few days before Easter, though you are likely reading it later, it is snowing! What in the world?! Just when I was ready to pack away the winter coats, boots, scarves, hats, mittens, and long-johns, and exchange them for flip flops and swim trunks, here we are again. It has been a very long, cold, and wet winter-the kind where even if you bundle up you really don’t want to be outside, the kind where you sit longingly by the window looking for any sign of sunshine or spring.

It has also been the year of Covid-19 affecting every aspect of life. I’m sick of people dying, of masks, of not visiting, of not hugging. I really need spring for more than one reason. Spring is not just warmer, it feels like hope when trees start budding leaves and flowers bloom, bees buzz and butterflies flutter. Spring feels like, maybe, just maybe we are going to make it. As Christians in the present time, we live in what several Bible scholars call the “Now and Not Yet.” There is hurt, but there is hope. There is death, but also healing. And someday, in the age to come, as Steve Carter has said, we won’t even need hope, because we won’t have hurt. But in the mean time, snow still comes in our spring days and jobs are lost and necks ache and migraines come back, and much more difficult things than these.

Have you ever felt like that? Like your life has been hard or dark, and then you finally start getting some sunshine? Things finally start falling into place and then BAM! Right back at square one!? Maybe with a terminal illness, debilitating condition, mental illness, building a home, recovering from divorce or walking through grief. Listen to this song I wrote with Nick Coetzee if you can relate. (The song is way better than the video. Anyone making tutorials on music videos? This girl needs help!)