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Spring Is Coming

             You have heard these things; look at them all. Will you not admit them? “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you. (Isaiah 48:6)


            Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. (John 12:24)

 

Spring is almost here. I know that for some, it’s been here since March 20, or it’s been here for a couple of weeks. But the end of April is when work picks up at the garden center where I work, it’s when the panic sets in about my own gardens. And it’s beginning of a “new year” in my life, when, in the next week, I officially become one year older than I was last week. We have also (finally!) finished slogging through the winter part of the book I’m reading.

          I hope that spring is also almost here spiritually. I’ve been slogging through the winter of dreams in the book I’m reading, and with my dreams. Like a kernel of wheat, my dreams have fallen to the ground and died, one by one and one after another. Like G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones world, sometimes the winter of our dreams lasts days. Sometimes, it lasts (it seems) centuries. But I hope for all of us winter is finally almost over.

          As difficult as winters can be, they’re necessary. They give some plants a rest. For some plants, the cold time is necessary. The seeds need to be “cold stratified.” It’s the cold followed by the warm that tells them to sprout.

          But spring isn’t a time of sitting back and rejoicing. Spring is busier than winter, because it’s not just the seeds growing that we want to grow, it’s all the seeds. In our spring of dreams, there may be all sorts of ideas and possibilities, but some need to be ripped out. It we don’t, they take over our lives and kill the dreams we really want to grow. Others have to be planted indoors, on heating mats, with grow lights over them and slowly “hardened out” so that when it’s time to plant them, they’re ready to grow.

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