The coming of spring appeals to something deep and primal in all of us. The long, cold days have had their impact on us. They have resulted in severe attacks of seasonal affective disorder that have put large numbers of us on life support. Those not on life support are, at the very least, longing for warmth, sunshine, and deliverance.
When I was a small boy, we got our first record player. At that time, my mom bought a few records that had songs for children on them. One of the songs was a celebration of spring by some bears coming out of hibernation. The line from the song that I remember is, “It’s spring again; it’s spring again; it’s time to dance and sing again.” Baptists have never been much on dancing, and singing has never been one of my strong suits, but I can identify with the exuberant joy of that little song. Spring does that for us.
As winter begins to loosen its grip on our community, the early flowers herald the coming of spring. The Japanese magnolias, flowering quince, jonquils, and forsythia (aka, yellow bells) bring life and beauty to the landscape. I don’t know if it is because we’ve had one of the coldest winters on record, but whatever it is the flowers have never looked more beautiful this year. I especially love the forsythia. Before putting on their leaves, they put on a brilliant display of yellow flowers that are things of beauty.
Along with the stirring to life of the landscape, we have the beauty and joy of Easter. The two seem to go together. The late Grady Nutt was a great storyteller. When I was in Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Grady came to speak at chapel one year shortly before Easter. In his message, he told one of my favorite stories of this season of the year.
His friends had a boy who was five years old. Bringing him under control was an ongoing challenge. One of the things that aided them in that challenge was a row of forsythia bushes in the back yard. These bushes had long, lithe branches that the Lord seemed to have designed to serve as switches. Often during the year, the parents would be forced to go to one of the forsythia bushes in the backyard and break off one of the branches to use as a corrective device on their son. As Nutt said, “The yard was littered with the shattered remains of many hard-learned lessons.” In fact, the parents had used the forsythia branches so often to teach these lessons that their son came to hate the forsythia bushes.
His mother said that during spring one year their son came in from the backyard with a shocked look on his face. He said to his mother, “Mother, you’ll never believe this, but there’s flowers blooming on all the switches.”
Something like that happened in Jerusalem one time. On the cross, a device that dispensed the most awful punishment, a flower bloomed in the spring of the year. And since that day, the world has never been the same!
