When Spring is Hard and Necessary

I am trying to believe

I sit out on the front step, cracked concrete cold beneath my legs. Snow is stacked in heaps around the picnic table; we measure in feet still, not inches yet. But more melting comes each afternoon, golden sun pooling the iced edges into mud. 

The birds are back. Song fills the air again, call and response, lilting and sweet. I know so few by name, but their melodies soar my spirit like a friend.

Spring is rising on the air. Resurrection could come again this time.

I am trying to believe.

//

This morning children and adults were murdered in a school. 

I could write that same sentence over and over and over, most weeks of the year.

//

Tomorrow we will take palms in our hands and wave them. Like we are branches. Like we are banners. Like we are children.

Jubilant cries of Hosanna! at the beginning of church. Shouts of Crucify him! by the end.

We will choose violence again.

Again and again and again.

Mostly we will stand bored in the muddled middle, sheepishly holding the flimsy palm, half-heartedly muttering crucify him as we shift from foot to foot. Maybe the crowds that day were much the same: who’s that guy carrying the cross anyway and when are we getting lunch? Maybe inaction has always led to more death.

Save us, we cry. Save us from ourselves.

//

This morning I watched a 10-minute old lamb try to walk. I stopped doom-scrolling social media and let that video play and play and play. I ached for something new, fresh, hopeful. 

The lamb never made it upright. Front legs buckled, then back legs buckled. It spent more time on its knees than its feet. But the mother licked its new face clean, and inside something staggered up within me too, all knobbly knees and awkward attempts.

Holy Saturday is one short week away, our day of emptiness and grief. Whatever his friends felt after he was murdered and buried, dead and gone, they must have edged hopelessness. For he was Hope Incarnate, Love Beyond Telling and Mercy Abundant, every promise of the prophets, every dream of salvation for centuries. But then he was tortured, hammered, beaten and bloodied. Scorned by the powerful, slaughtered by the state, swaddled in burial clothes and sealed in a tomb.

And then. He rose.

Whatever rising must be, it looks nothing like anyone expected. It takes time. 

//

When I get lost, I go back to the stories. When I get truly lost, I go back to the beginning.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters (Genesis 1:1-2).

A formless wasteland. Darkness covering an abyss. In the midst of nothing, utter desolation, the Spirit stirs and starts to breathe. The Word speaks into the silence. Suddenly Light is.

Why would we expect anything less this time?

Behold, I am doing something new. Now it springs forth; do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:19)

// 

Spring is hard and necessary. 

The refrain cycles through my thoughts as I drive these days, school to school, practice to practice. On the interstate the median has melted away to mottled gray-brown grass. Every shoulder shrugs off the darkened snow, leaving scattered trash from six long months. In spring we have to reckon with what was buried, what we tried to deny or hide away. Now it is all laid bare before us.

The despairing side of me says my children will fear for my grandchildren’s lives at school the same way I fear for theirs. The way my parents and grandparents never did for me.

The shrinking side of me—the grain-sized glimmer of hope I still carry, duty-bound as a Christian—says we are in the middle of a long, hard chapter as a country. Every movement for justice or social change took an achingly long time. I will likely not see the progress I desire, but it may still come.

Now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?

//

Spring asks us to do hard work.

To clean trash from the roadside and leaves from the gutters. To scrub the streaked windows and straighten the mailbox knocked by the snow plow. To break up the frozen earth and dirty our hands in cold soil. To push small, hard seeds into the oblivion of darkness. 

To believe without a shred of evidence.

But one day in April, I will catch sight of the first buds again. Tiny hearts clasped tight, tipping up toward the sun from every branch. The old electric zing of hope, the thrill of new life, will return like resurrection. Even the air will smell like promise.

Now is not-yet. We are still hunched over hard work on the roadside, grumbling about the mess that others made, cramming bag after bag with the trash of our so-called civilization.

But this muddling middle time cannot be bypassed or sped through. It is the stage of sludge that turns winter to spring, the long work of cold days when summer shimmers only like a mirage of memory. The choice looms clear: I can stay bitter, huddled, hunkered down, waiting for someone else to do the work, some other softer season to arrive.

Or I can pull on old boots and gloves, dig the dusty shovel out of the garage, and remember that the only way any piece of the work gets done is by doing. This is a hard and necessary season, but we are ready to reckon. I catch the scent of something new in the air, and I will not let hope go.

Now it springs.

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I have written about gun violence and school shootings for years and years. I keep calling my representatives, sending the emails, making the donations, praying and praying and praying. I’m fed up and I’m doing more and I hope you’ll join those of us who feel the same—to do something more this Tuesday. Learn more here at

4/4 - For Change, For Kids