All Things

Lent has brought us halfway to Easter, and my chosen deprivation, a small token, hasn't become the daily death of a true sacrifice. Despite this, my thoughts wind involuntarily toward the Cross.

Outside, spring barely begins to unfurl. Sunlight, pale from a winter locked away, still warms the breeze that slips around our bare necks. Birds warble and fret by the windows again; they flap and flutter in the walls. A stain of color on his breast, the zealous bird on the roof loudly seeks a wife. Drowsy insects stir. The box elder bugs are patience itself, moving one spindly leg and the next and the next on a fruitless journey from one end of the room to the other, unapologetically using our arms and feet as rest stops. Dull leaves scuttle across the yard, and we wait for green to appear, for bright shards rising from pebble and muck. We've not seen one blossom. The sky shifts from haggard gray to brilliant blue and back again because March is too skittish to make decisions, and we wait.

Seasons are reassuring. Each year, we see a chill, lifeless world in its monochrome of grays and tans and know that it's not really dead, just waiting. Beneath the surface, worms break from their group-bundles and squirm to the sun, small creatures dig and move, and green waits for the right time to spear upward. The hope of each Easter is the same, and this season of overlapping death and life reflects the Christ.
For this, too, we wait.