muddy spring
I held the pen coil tightly between my thumb and forefinger adding just enough pressure on either end to keep the wires flush together. Providing equally distributed weight to both sides proved difficult, making the wire unstable and suddenly I have jerk my head back trying to avoid injury as it shoots unpredictably across the room.
When I think of a spring, that’s what I think of. Pressure, weight, crushing, until finally enough is enough and there’s a sudden and forceful bounce back in response.
The oppressive winter has long been holding us back, but oh, just you wait. As soon as that first day of spring gets here, bam! The sun will be shining, the flowers will be blooming, the trees that we thought were dead will shake new leaves onto their sleeping branches.
I wish the season of spring came with such a sudden a joyous burst of entry. But growth isn’t always and is hardly ever like that. We grow up with depictions of spring as everything bright and beautiful but we forget sometimes that “April showers bring May flowers.”
Where my husband and I call home, Spring is synonymous with the mud of melting snow. There comes a point when the snow stops falling and people who are new to the climate begin rubbing their hands together in anticipation knowing that spring is on the way. What they don’t know is how long it takes snow to thaw and the muck it leaves behind.
Still, locals will anticipate Spring with joy, because though they know it’s messy and it’s still not filled with the warmth that they desire, it holds promise. They anticipate it every year, becoming accustomed to what spring is supposed to look like and knowing that we will get to experience the brightness and boldness of color “if we faint not.”
the best summers come after the messiest springs.
But it’s important to remember even the importance of the previous seasons: the busy autumn and the dormant winter.
Out of curiosity, I googled when the best time to start a garden was, fully expecting it to be within the first few days of Spring. It’s such a clear image in our head: the retired lady down the street who used to work a desk job and now spends her days tending her garden. The sun out and beating down on her but she is faithful with her wide brim hat, gloved hands and ready garden trowel. The answer surprised me, however:
“Planting a prosperous garden begins far before the spring growing season.”
Spring holds promise but growth takes time. Sometimes by the “spring growing season” you’ve even forgotten what you’d planted in the fall. And by the time the snow comes you’re sure that whatever it was is dead and gone. Then mud comes as if to prove to you there was nothing of hope, nothing to look forward to lying beneath the snow.
But whether it looks like it or not, spring holds promise. Growth holds promise. The beginning of our growing season doesn’t look like growth. It looks like pain. It looks like dirt. It looks like the weather is mocking you, like the mud of your past mistakes is threatening to pull you under. Your shoes might even become as casualty to the mud as you’re forced to pull your foot free in order to continue forward momentum.
Without that mud, without that rain, without seeing the ground that you were hoping would be blossoming with flowers, outstretched and laid bare—all its mess and muck exposed to the light, you will not see growth.
But when the field goes through the vulnerable and often nasty process of springtime, you can rub your hands together in anticipation. Something beautiful is getting ready to break through the soil.
I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow…you are God’s field… 1 Corinthians 3:6-9
