Friday, May 14, 2010

Spring Snow


Spring in Edmonton is a tease. You get several warm days—enough to make you dig out the t-shirts and want to run to the garden store—but then you are slammed once again with cold and possibly even snow. So we sometimes see two things that don’t often go together: new green leaves and cold white snow.

I wonder why the leaves don’t just figure out by now that they need to wait a little longer. But there is no caution in spring. It will not wait for a better time. It just is. Is now. So very green and new.

Once it’s begun, growth is never straightforward. We step ahead and we fall back. We step ahead and we are slammed with snow. Why are we surprised? After all, we were told: “In this world you will have trouble.” You will, you will have trouble. We’re also told to “take heart” because Christ has overcome the world.

Overcoming is as long and hard to pin down as anything I know. But if snow and new leaves can survive each other, maybe we will survive too.