Beautifully Barren

It’s January. Everything is brown and gray. The hills aren’t alive, they’re barren and I feel it in my soul. The cold seeps down to bone-level. The rain sheds tears I am unable to produce myself. Glimmers of hope may come on sunny days, but often it seems to mock the gray I feel within.

We know how this works by now – how seasons and cycles are necessary to growth and abundance. Yet winter’s lifelessness echoes a sort of hopeless wail, like a howling wind on a dark night. Will spring return? Will the season ever end?

I’ve never much appreciated winter. In my geographical location we experience schizophrenic weather and social media is often full of memes of how we experience all four seasons in a single week. Stuck between places that receive enough snow to adorn gray days and others where summer never fully dies, we are left with sullen, dreary days– some cold, some not, but all brown.

Daring myself to go for a walk one winter day, I bundled up against the cold, intentionally listening to music that reminded my heart to hope. Unexpectedly, my eyes were opened and I began to see differently. What once appeared to be mere dead foliage along the side of the road became, instead, a vessel of hope. There was beauty here amongst the decay, treasure that called to mind both the abundance of the past and the life yet to come. I was astounded at the wonder of it all. Here, right outside my front door, were marvelous parables of life, death, and resurrection. Who would have thought there could be so much beauty in all this barrenness?!

And my heart began to hope.