New Life Fits and Starts

The daffodils have made their appearance. The trees are flowering and getting green. The smell of newly mown grass comes wafting in through the open window. It’s springtime in New Jersey—one of my favorite times of the year.

And yet, it is also a time when, one day is damp and raw, while the next day, the sun is shining brightly and the temperatures warm up. Should I turn up the heat? Don’t we need the air conditioning? When I consider my vegetable garden, there are days when I wonder if I really need to wait until Mother’s Day to put in the tomatoes, while there can be days later in May when I worry about a morning frost. Spring brings new life to the world around us here in the Northeast, which makes it such a lovely time of the year, but the new life comes, not in a smooth progression, but in fits and starts.

And I think that’s how it is with more than just springtime. There are seasons of transition in life. Something new is coming, but it doesn’t arrive smoothly, on schedule. It’s more confused than that. New life comes to us in fits and starts.

          

By July, the AC will be running full tilt. There will be a time when the new thing that we anticipate now will be old hat. But, for now, we can find, if we choose—if not joy fully bloomed, then at least life, in all the incredible wonder of its fits as well as its starts.

--Pastor Don Steele