Just Around the Corner | Jessica Ptomey

We’ve all heard the expression: “Spring is just around the corner.” Well, today is officially the first day of Spring, and I’m staring out my window at beautiful………snow……..several inches of it. The blossoms and birds will be a little while longer. It’s Winter’s ironic joke and last hurrah.

Looking at the tree limbs and deck covered in piles of white, one would never think of Easter being a week and a half away. It’s hard to imagine that in a very short time we will have sunny 60-70 degree weather. Though the view from my window tempts me to think that Winter will be here for awhile, a glance at my calendar tells me otherwise.

I find this phenomenon — this contrast between the weather now and the weather soon coming — to offer a particularly timely meditation for the transition from Lent to Easter in our lives as Christ-followers, especially since we are almost to Holy Week on the liturgical calendar.

I know you’ve been through those dark times. I have too. The darkest before the dawn, as is said. My children and I are currently reading The Long Winter, book 6 in the Little House series by Laura Ingles Wilder, and in the book the South Dakota prairie gets a lot of snow for a long time. If it is a “Long Winter” in your spiritual life, the last thing you want toward the end of the season is another blizzard.

In fact, with every drop in temperature, every storm of snow or ice, it may seem that the dreary sky and frigid air will never change. You begin to believe that Winter will never end. There are times that the beautiful, new buds of Spring in the spiritual life are actually “just around the corner,” but you would never know it from the current climate, from the trials of the moment that you are walking through.

I may have a calendar on my wall and a weather app on my phone that assure me of the closeness of Spring, but we usually don’t have the equivalent in the spiritual seasons of life. We don’t have the knowledge of when the storm clouds will lift, but we have the promise that they will. We have the reality of Easter and the hope of heaven.

No matter what our trials, the Lenten season within the liturgical year always serves to re-focus our gaze on our destination. We are pilgrims on a journey — a difficult and heart-breaking journey at times — but our destination is sure. Jesus says, my peace I give to you and a place of rest I have prepared for you. What does this mean? It means we have hope. It means we do not walk alone. It means that our deliverer is close at hand. It means that our sorrows will only last a time, and then…joy. It may not seem like it, but Easter is just around the corner. So hold on…hold on to Him and to His promises.