Heart Spring

It’s been an exhausting but awesome Easter weekend. I’ve had a house full of company and a heart full of gratitude for the amazing wonder of it all.

Where I live, Easter usually marks the turning point between winter and spring, and this year is no exception.  It’s the point at which the cold gives way to warmth. Darkness gives way to light. Death gives way to life. The monochrome bursts into color. The silence gives way to song. Hope is fulfilled.

The spiritual analogies are profound.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead makes Spring burst forth in our lives. It causes us to be “born again to a living hope” and “walk in newness of life.” (1 Peter 1:3; Rom. 6:4)

My favorite Christian Poet, Luci Shaw, captures the sentiment this way:

New birth: heart spring

often after easter
last summer’s deep
seeds rebel
at their long frozen sleep
split, swell
in the dark under
ground, twist, dance
to a new beat
push through a lace of old
pale roots

invited by an unseen heat
they spearhead up, almost
as though, suddenly,
their tender shoots
find the loam light
as air
not dense, not sodden cold

I saw a crocus once
in first flight
stretching so fast
from a late snow
(a boundary just passed
a singular horizon close below)
the white cap melting
on its purple head

such swift greening of leaf wings
and stalk was clear celebration
of all sweet springs
combined
of sungold
smell of freshness, wind
first-time felt
light lifting, all new things
all things
good and right and all the old
left behind

(by Luci Shaw, in Polishing the Petoskey Stone, Harold Shaw Publishers: Wheaton, Illinois, 1990)

Thanks to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, all those seeds, so full of promise, hidden deep in my spirit, can rebel against winter and break forth with life. I am awed by this God of Easter. This God who bursts forth from the grave with power to “make all things new.”