I drive the interstate a lot. It drives right through Denver, and so when I want to get somewhere across town, or in the mountains, it’s usually the fastest route to take. Sometime this winter I noticed a couple burnt patches by the road. My guess is there was a small fire of some sort, probably from a wreck. Those patches stand out against the rest of the brown, dead weed covered side of the road. Black, barren, a blank slate, nothing there.
It snowed this last weekend. It was a pretty big storm – the type that if you just moved here from California you might call a blizzard. If you’ve lived here for a couple years, it was simply one of the biggest storms of the year, not a blizzard. The snow was wonderful – big, feathery, wet flakes that gave relief to our very dry, cracked ground. We needed the moisture desperately.
And, in true Colorado fashion, the only thing that remained three days later was a dirty clump of snow here and a forgotten pile there. It’s pretty much all gone, melted away, soaked into our ground or re-evaporated back into the atmosphere and now floating over Nebraska or Kansas.
So our roads are clear of slush and easy to drive again, which was nice for my drive last night. I was headed west, up the interstate and into our mountains. Since it’s Lent, and I’m not listening to music in my car, I was doing what I should do more often – praying.
And I noticed the bare patches were no longer bare. There was a very light covering of green over them. I realized that Spring was coming (YAY), but more importantly I realized that the green was probably under the still brown, brittle, dead weeds too. But I couldn’t see it because of the weeds.
Which, of course, got me thinking. I think sometimes God allows us to go through the fires so that we can see the growth He’s been nourishing in us. I think sometimes He allows the old stuff to stick around and cover up what He’s doing so we don’t get in the way.
Either way, He’s God, and growth is occurring. Growth (like spring) is a wonderful, dance-inciting thing. So if you feel like you’re going through a fire, rejoice. You’ll soon see growth. If you feel like nothing’s going on in your life and you have a lot of extra stuff hanging about – dig a bit. I bet down, buried under all the leftover junk, are little tips of green, growing up ever so steadily.
In His Chrysalis 