Where are You Spring?

Okay, sorry, I know I promised a blog in the few days following my last post and now here it is a week later. "Better late than never"

The fall here was beautiful, the winter was snowy and cold, and the spring... well I don't know yet. I grew up in San Antonio, TX. I'm used to maybe a month or two or semi-cold weather then back to milder temperatures. The summers there are long and the kids can't concentrate in school past spring break because you just want to go outside and play. But that isn't what I'm getting here. Winter has been cold and long. I loved the snow and was thankful it wasn't the ice storms of Oklahoma, but when does this end? Today the high is 79! But I've seen this before. We even had a whole weekend of mid 60s only to drop back below freezing and get a light flurry. They're predicting we may even see snow in May. May!? Oh please Lord, save me from this misery!

When will the trees bloom? Will the leaves be gone forever? I wanted to write a spring follow up to my fall and winter blogs talking of the renewal we find in the Lord. But God isn't letting me do that. Instead he's teaching me something else. It's a lesson I've had to endure before. But never has it been so poignant.

As I drive through Topeka, I see the barren trees and gaze into the gray sky, wondering where all the beauty of life is. When will I feel the warmth of the sun? When will I see the signs of new life. And then the other day I noticed something. The grass is green. No, not just the overly fertilized grass of businesses and the professionally manicured ones in the nicer neighborhoods. All the grass is green. All over Topeka I see green grass. Oh and beautiful yellow bushes with a sprinkle of a few red buds on smaller trees. Once again my focus was only on the bad, the dreary, what God wasn't making beautiful in my life. I failed to see that the Lord was blessing the very ground I walk upon. Though the sky gray and many trees still barren, the path the Lord has laid before me is blessed. There is life. I just have to be willing to see it.

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me." (Psalm 23:4)

When all that is around you seems dead; when the world's not all as it should be, know that the very path you tread is laid out by the Hand of God.