I mournfully peered out of my living room window to my patch of daffodils by the sidewalk. The “daffys” were blooming with their boisterous yellow cheerfulness. They had been bringing a joyful smile to my heart every day as I anticipated the green grass and the blue skies of spring that they announce every year.
But today, the snow was falling in cornflake sized clumps from a grey-milk sky. The harsh intensity of the squall was ridiculous. While a late March snowstorm is not unusual in Michigan, it felt unnatural because of the warmer days and the unseasonal blooms that had responded to the rising temperatures. The snow today felt like an affront to the seasons, a rude and preposterous interruption of the cold shoulder of winter cutting into a warm spring time dance.
As the snow gathered like impromptu fancy white hats on the now ducked and demure heads of the sunny daffodils, I found myself concerned about the flowers. I knew that non blooming daffodils can survive the freezing cold, but I wasn’t so sure about my daffodils once they had started to bloom. Was this going to be the end of my daffys? Would they be all dead and withered and gone even before Easter morning had dawned?
As the snow kept falling through the day and gathered ever deeper, the yellow of the blooms was soon covered up and then it completely disappeared. The fluffy white snow frosting was more appropriate for Christmas cookies than for Eastertide flowers. My flowers were completely entombed. If you didn’t know where they had been planted, there would have been no evidence of where to look for them. Surely, they were all dead under there. Certainly, there was no way they would be able to come back from this terrible calamity. Despondent, I resisted the temptation to go out with my snow shovel, to dig the daffodils out of the snowbank and to put an extension corded space heater in the flowerbed. I consoled myself with a mantra: What will be, would be.
But, I need not have worried. Within 48 hours, the sun had come out, the frosty tomb had disintegrated and the daffodils had all boldly shook off their white coats of snow. Their yellow noses pointed at the blue sky and laughed at my fears and concerns. They trumpeted their message to me together: They were indeed alive!
In this season of Easter, I am reminded that Christ too was entombed in a cold harsh grave, and that all of the disciples had lost their hope that they would ever see Jesus alive again. While his death on a cross was a much worse event than a spring time snow storm, his resurrection miracle was the dramatic beginning to a whole new way of being for humanity. Death from sin had been conquered. Love had won. The hearts and the minds of the disciples had been transformed from fear to faith.
This spring, as we celebrate the Easter, let us all remember that the love of Christ can also resurrect our own cold hearts, just like daffodils can pop up and shake off the snow. We can live and thrive again, despite all of the dark storms of life that envelope and surround us. We too can experience the resurrection of Christ in our own lives, –If we have the faith to allow God’s love to make it so. I pray that we will! Amen.
Article published in Rockford Squire: 4/4/2024
