As I walked the girls home from school this afternoon, I was beautifully surprised by the incredible weather we experienced today. The sun was out, the temperature was up, and the sidewalks were free of ice and snow. It almost felt like Spring!
But having grown up in Montana and calling this state home for the past seven years, I know better than to think Spring has actually arrived. As much as we might trick ourselves, we all know this is ‘Fake Spring.’ Before we know it, the snow will reappear and Winter will rear its ugly head once more (if not more than once).
Now, it’s okay to hope. It’s fine to get excited about our newly-found good weather. But the realists in us know better than to assume the cold and snowy weather is gone. We hope and anxiously wait for warm and sunny weather to be the everyday norm, but we do so knowing there will still be a number of stormy spells before Summer arrives.
Which is the same posture we can, and should, hold as followers of Jesus. We live in this transitional time of history—stuck between the joy of resurrection and the ultimate joy of Jesus’ return. We get small, but powerful and hopeful, glimpses of God’s kingdom, but we also still live in a world of sin and pain. We are witness to God’s movement and action, the blessing of our world through the good news of Jesus, but are also privy to the imperfections of our world—war, violence, poverty, racism, etc.
We live in the “Fake Spring” of history—longing and hoping for the eternal joy of ‘summer’ with God, while still enduring our fair sure of ‘wintery’ pain, suffering, and evil. But that’s okay. It’s alright to be in this time and place—because God is with us. So let’s strive to be people who faithfully and hopefully stand in the threshold of this historical and cosmic transition. Let’s embed ourselves deeply in our current world, not longing and hoping so fervently for the next season that we miss out on the beauty of what God is doing now…today.
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