Spring is a season of new beginnings and exquisite beauty. Everything that just appeared lifeless and grey is bursting forth with new energy and color. I call it the Renaissance, because it reminds me of new birth. And for me, that’s a multi-dimensional experience.
Because so much life appears all around us, it’s easy to assume that renewal just sort of happens automatically. But nothing could be further from the truth. Springtime represents a triumph – a victory won through a fierce, even savage struggle and patient determination.
We love, for example, to see the trees or vines begin their growth for the year. But it’s easy to forget how many of those plants were pruned – some of them nearly all the way back to the ground – in order to produce maximum beauty.
Plowing is another struggle of spring. Flowers, cash crops, or vegetables won’t grow on last year’s hardened earth. Without breaking up the fallow ground and creating an environment in which the plant can flourish, today’s seed becomes tomorrow’s bird food.
Butterflies, those majestic symbols of the season, are another example. For weeks the caterpillar has disappeared into a cocoon of its own making. Come spring, there’s only one way out. The emerging butterfly has to fight for its freedom. And yet it’s in the fight that its wings are developed. Should some well-meaning person try to short-cut the process, the butterfly would quickly die.
In nature, there’s nothing automatic or even easy about spring. And the same could be said about your renewal as well. Everywhere I turn lately, it feels like the world and the people in it are groaning for something new – for relief, for healing, for a new beginning. But I haven’t heard anybody lately asking God to do in them what it takes for renewal to happen.
Renewed life takes pruning. Jesus made this clear. Have you felt as if things that made you proud of your life have been removed from you lately? Maybe it’s just God’s way of making you more fruitful in the future.
Or maybe, like the Lord commanded through Hosea, God is taking you through a plowing process, where He is enlarging your capacity to nurture life and growth by removing your “hard spots.”
Or maybe, like the butterfly, you feel as though you have to strain in order to gain. The temptation here is to look for a shortcut or a bailout (sorry, couldn’t resist). But it’s in the struggle that you develop your beauty.
It is in the process of breaking through – with God’s help, in His timing – that you discover the true meaning of freedom. To seek relief from that struggle, as many often do, only leads to greater hardship.
Learn the lessons of spring. Beauty, fruitfulness, and success are sometimes the result of pruning, plowing, or struggling against the things that have us bound.
Easy? Hardly. But incredibly worth it.