Today is the first day of spring. Another winter has come and gone, another cold season coming to an end as the days get longer and warmer. It always happens, doesn’t it? Even when we think it will never come, spring returns, reminding us of the beauty promised after darkness.
It’s so very, very easy to get caught up in regret-in that winter of your life where things seem harder than you think they should be. You look at your life and you don’t see the thousands of successes and joys – you see those times when you fell short, those times when you lost touch, those times when you failed. It’s so easy to see how we have been shaped by the things we’ve done to ourselves. We look at the path we’ve traveled, and we see it littered with the detritus of our mistakes and missteps. But under all that junk? Something new is growing.
Something amazing.
Something unlike you have dared to imagine.
Something akin to a miracle.
“We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested. The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.”
Daniel Abraham
Here’s the thing about renewal, though – we have to want to go through it. We have to want to live that full life of joy, of purpose, of commitment to living our lives in a deep harmony with creation and the Creator. Renewal doesn’t happen just because you want it to – it only happens after you move aside the stuff that has buried you and you allow that renewal to spring forth. And what springs forth isn’t the old stuff reborn – it’s something completely new, attached to who we are by the deepest roots we have into our world.
Renewal comes with every season – we just have to be open to seeing the rebirth through what has been piled up, stifling it. Mourn what was lost, dig through what covers you up, and lean into the renewal of your heart, tender and beautiful and fully whole in a new way. Renewal comes at a price, but it’s a price well worth paying when it leads you closer to who you are meant to be.