Waiting for the light

If you’re anything like me, you go into the garden or into the park on a regular basis and look hopefully at the daffodils and the blossom trees.  I have some special tulips which I planted in bowls way back in September in great excitement. Every day  I go and have a quick look, to see if they’ve grown,  or better still show any sign of flowering. They don’t.  I feel like Toad in the Frog and Toad stories who dug up his seeds to see if they were growing.

But at the same time, I know, without a shadow of doubt, that spring will come, my tulips will flower and the trees be covered with blossom.

It’s a bit like that for Christians right now.  The secular world probably looks at us with incomprehension.  They see in the echoing churches a sea of grey heads. They hear us arguing about things that make no sense.  They see the growing attractiveness of the me-culture and the steady decline of old-fashioned virtues,  like selflessness and honour. They hear the steady tramp of the greedy rich across the globe.

No wonder people find religious people peculiar –discord, greed, hardship, duplicity and cruelty are everywhere. But where is the loving, merciful God ?

Well, it’s like this.  Just as I go out into the garden to peer at the stubbornly tiny tulip, knowing without doubt that spring is coming, so I go to church on  Easter Eve, and looking around the tiny crowd lighting their Easter candles one from another, till the darkness is filled with light, that God’s promise holds.  We know this from the evidence of the past and from the stubborn flame in our heads and hearts, a thing called faith.

The Western world has chosen to turn its back on God, but still God’s promise of light in darkness and new life from death holds true.

Spring is coming. The days are getting lighter already.