...in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.   — I Corinthians 15

 

I always have high hopes for the month of March.  Maybe it’s because as a kid, I used it as something of a emotional security blanket that I just might survive another school year, including even the daily, near-death experiences called P.E.

Even now, when March comes, I think, “we’ve almost made it.”  But if I stop and ask myself what “it” is that we have almost made it through, the answer is a little unclear. 

This year it feels like March might mean we have made it through a long, chilling, even painful winter.  I would like to hope that it means we have come through the worst of what so many people in our community have had to weather and endure economically.  I hope it might hold the turning point for peace and for our service personnel to be able to come home at long last. 

I certainly do hope that March holds all those, and more.  Because there is such a need for them.

I think that, even as a kid, I absorbed the message that God is the source of what happened in March—that annual transformation of the earth with the silent explosion of colors, and then the rising symphony of the sounds and movements of new life. It was predictable that spring was coming, and March would be the messenger.  But every year, it never failed to shock me to see the dull gray barrenness of the land go from a black and white photo into a brilliant full-color one. 

How was it possible? Which day would be the one that the tips of the tree branches would go suddenly vibrant green with new life?  Or what day would I come out of the house and instead of wincing at that first sharp sting of air, I would be met by the delightful breath of spring and instinctively try to breathe in as much of it as I could?

It’s little wonder that people have associated spring-time with resurrection, and there are rituals all over the world that all but worship spring-time as a life-giving power in itself.  That, however, is to go too far with expectations for March, as if spring-time alone is enough to meet the deepest longings of the human heart. 

But it is still appropriate to take March as a powerful metaphor of what is true for us now and will be incredibly, unimaginably true for us by the grace of God in the future Jesus Christ holds for us in his hands.

Without our being aware of it, life is flowing through us in ways we scarcely recognize.  Our feelings of barrenness and cold mortality will indeed give way to a revelation of the glory of God, all in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye at the last day of human winter and the dawn of God’s ultimate spring-time. 

It can feel as though spring will never come.  But it will.  It may feel as though resurrection and the power of new life are not possible.  But as sure as the daffodils are already breaking through what was frozen ground a few days ago, the power of new life in Jesus Christ has entered our world and our lives—and the result will be something all the months of March together can never match. 

 

 R