Delicate and Persistent Hope

As new life breaks forth from the ground, the days grow longer, and lent continues on, I find myself reflecting on the fragility of hope.

In the fall I planted tulip and daffodil bulbs for the first time. It felt silly, almost—planting bulbs with the impending barenness of winter. Logically, I knew that spring would come, but as my hands were soiled with chilled ground and I laid bulbs to rest, all I could see was the end-of-season death of the trees and flowers around that once bursted with life. I wondered, would it “work”? Is this really how tulips and daffodils grow? Oh, how spring felt so far away!

As we near the end of Lent, I find it easier to slip into cynicism, fear, and sorrow than to think about the joy of new life. Death is all around. Jonah died after a 15 month journey with lymphoma. It’s nearing the 1-year anniversary of Scott’s death. Bruce battles daily with his health while his wife is worn with care-giving fatigue. It’s time for my yearly scans. The cancer could be back, the healing might not come, the relationship isn’t getting better, and the court date is approaching. And, and, and. We can all fill in the blanks here. Lent (much like suffering) is this uncomfortable and heavy period of time where we are forced to face the terribleness of life in all of its desolation and incompleteness. It’s a time of silence, suffering, and death. After all, Lent starts with a reminder on our foreheads that we all came from dust and we will once again return to the earth as dust. We are asked to sit in our own dust-ness. For 40 long days.

Now as I watch the gray once-frozen mulch give way to bright green sprouts, I can’t help but wonder if hope is much like these infant plants, breaking through the petrified earth. I think hope has both the fragility and determination of these little greens. While hope may lay dormant for a season—whether days, months, or years—it keeps searching for that sunlight, and when it is ready, it starts to find it’s way to the surface. No longer is it a young and immature like a bulb, but instead it has been changed by the waiting of the dark and cold winter. It emerges, pressing up, resolute in its purpose.

Maybe I, too, am like these flower bulbs—easily reminded of the icy winter, gritty from the journey, and yet still determined to find that sunlight. Because I have faced my own dust-ness, the dust has rubbed off on the hope I carry. This gritty, soiled hope has come at a cost and yet is all the richer from its hybernation…and so am I.

Lent is a reminder for me that death surrenders to resurrection much like winter raises a white flag to spring; and hope, in all of it’s sprout-like fragility and determination, eventually breaks through the darkness, fear, and suffering in search of joy and renewed life.