rise and shine
My first thought, when Kevin casually mentioned the coming rain, the bone-cold breeze, the silent freezing night, was that the blooms would die.
I peered out the back window, watching the pear tree dance, decked in blooms like a lacy bride, pure, new, completely vulnerable to the fury of unvanquished Winter. All week, I had walked the neighborhood streets gathering stems in my mind—elegant tulips stained plum, wild slashes of royal redbud, delicate dogwoods. I’d watched the daffodils unfold, smiling to see their golden cups dot the ground with the promise of sunshine. It was too early, I thought. I instructed my hope that way, in fact. But I couldn’t help celebrating, just a little.
Apprentices to Jesus never watch for Spring without remembering the resurrection, and this year, well before the calendar officially marches us into our observances of holy week, we have felt the inevitability of death. We have worn the news like slashes of dark ash thumb-smudged on our foreheads. We have looked out the window, under shadow of Winter’s pressing clouds, and felt the wait outside a stone-sealed tomb. We’ve lived isolated for years–two now bleeding into three, but this last week, I had returned to the garden. While I gathered flowers in my spiritual arms, while I grinned at the re-awakening of life, I felt like I bumped into someone familiar. The Gardener, maybe? But then He said my name, tenderly, the way He’s been whispering it in God’s ear all this time, and I knew: No, not just the Gardener; my Christ.
Scriptures say that in the days following the resurrection, the disciples saw and worshipped Christ, but some doubted (see Matthew 28:17). Faith in the resurrection didn’t come instantly for all of them. For some, faith developed as they watched Jesus eat fish on the shore by morning fires and as He appeared suddenly behind their locked doors and as they placed their own fingers in the holes that had been pounded into His suffering wrists by spikes. He lived as He had, and yet, they finally saw in Him a limitless and unconquerable eternity they had not recognized before. For over a month after the resurrection, Jesus kept coming back to them, teaching and touchable, and yet completely immortal (Acts 1:3). I wondered, as I sighed over those doomed blooms, if some of the disciples thought the resurrection was a dream that couldn’t last, if they thought it would eventually be as it was those three dead days, as though they’d lost Him all over again.
Before the rain came, I actually considered pulling all the vases from the cabinet, thinking I could wander the yard with my clippers and snip stems to shelter in the house. I could hide the resurrection in my heart and keep it safe. But at the end of the day, I realized how limiting that would be. I touched my fingers to the chilly glass before the light faded, hoping those silken petals possessed a hardiness I couldn’t see. I needed them somehow, needed to see their promise and touch it with my fingers. I also needed to know this hope could stand up to a storm. So I left the vases in the cabinet.
The forecast called for two days of rain and wind, another of bitter cold, and when the descent began, the house groaned as the wind whistled. The roads and sidewalks turned slick, black as ash. Riley saw bits of white-lace petals flying through the air and declared snow. I shook my head, knowing what she saw on the other side of that streaked window: flowers pelted down and blown asunder. I wouldn’t look. I wrapped my feet with a blanket and waited, expecting to see the tree naked, stripped down in the night, her beauty torn and muddy.
Faith wills me to tell you: the resurrection is no fragile thing. Winds blow and rains come and beat against the house, but the house still stands. In times of persecution, the Spirit fills the wind and God’s people grow. He came; He died; He rose, there’s a trinity of refrains crying out in victory against those dead days, an answer for every denial.
In the morning, I walk to the window, wondering why this natural tug-of-war between the seasons should make me feel so melancholy. If the blooms die early this year, more blooms will come in the next. Why does it matter? But of course, this is about more to me than flowers. Quickly, I glance toward the tree. Despite my fear, I have nurtured some hope that against all odds, she still looks like a new bride. I glance. I turn. And I gasp.
Instead of bare limbs, rugged and violated, I see a robe of white. If anything, my tree looks more beautiful than before. She looks triumphant, and somehow, more alive. The flowers, which have not been stripped away by storm or bitterness, seem to have multiplied in the night, like faith does when tested. I smile, grin wide and wild and spin in front of the window. A little dance, because deep down I knew–I knew–that Spring had come to stay.
