Here Comes the Sun

The days are growing longer, the snow is finally starting to melt away, and day by day the air grows warmer. The sky is less gray, and the sun appears more often than it has for the last few months. Though it is still a long while before Spring will have arrived properly, I can't help but think about it every day.

This winter has been a particularly long one for me. Twice as much snow fell as I had anticipated. When it first arrives, snow is exciting and beautiful, but as time wears on, it becomes a hassle to walk through it all day long. I wore snow boots for two months straight, and had to carry around a pair of shoes to wear indoors. When the grass finally started to peek out from beneath its snowy blanket, and several birds began returning to campus, I felt my heart swell.

For all the grief my allergies tend to cause me, I think Spring might be my favorite season. It is a time when all things are becoming new. It is a time where trees and plants sprout new growth, and animals give birth to their newest offspring.

It reminds me of the New Jerusalem described in the book of Revelation. All things that came before are wiped away, and the world becomes new and clean. It also brings to mind an image of Noah and the ark. He had to wait through 40 days of rain, only to have to wait longer after it stopped for the waters to clear away. When the dry land reappeared, though, all was clean and new.

Palm Sunday and Easter are very important parts of my Spring memories, throughout my life. Easter is a celebration of rebirth, and perhaps that is why I am so incredibly fond of it. No Easter bunnies or marshmallow peeps (though I do enjoy microwaving them...) for me. I'd much rather go to church. After the long, solemn season of Lent, Easter really does feel like a day when all of us are being reborn, and granted a chance to start anew.

Easter is even farther off than the start of Spring proper. But I'm holding them both close to my heart this week, so that I may ponder them while I wait. I look forward to that chance to feel renewed, that I may make a fresh start.

~*~

But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Romans 8:25

And the spirit returns to God who gave it

People react in many different ways when it comes to death. Mourning will never be the same even for one person mourning on different occasions. I've experienced death in my life, in many different forms. It always hurts, but never in the same way.

A close friend of the family died working as a firefighter in the September 11th attacks. I was only eleven at the time. I hadn't known him as closely as my parents and other relatives did. When it came time to go to the wake, I stood outside the building with my siblings and younger cousins, since they didn't want us causing a fuss, or having to see the incredible sadness inside. While my cousins felt free to run about and play, I was solemn. The weight of the death, even though I hadn't known the man well, was hanging on my heart.

When I was twelve a boy in the grade above me was struck by a car and killed. I had never met him. It was frightening to know that someone my own age could die. It was a sobering reminder of my own mortality, in a sense.

At the very beginning of my freshman year of high school, just two years later, a boy in the grade above me committed suicide. This was, perhaps, my most terrifying encounter with death yet. The thought of someone taking their own life was completely foreign to me. It went against everything I had learned both at home, at school, and in church. Life was a gift we had been given. It wasn't our place to take away that gift. Didn't "thou shalt not murder" apply to one's own life, too?

My mother passed away after a long battle with cancer when I was a few months shy of turning sixteen. Losing someone I knew personally, and loved so deeply hurt more than any other kind of pain I had felt before. Even now, over five years later, I still feel sort of constant sorrow in my soul. The gap left behind was simply too big to have the wound closed up.

Today, I learned that someone in the grade above me committed suicide. Again, I never knew him, never met him. Yet I feel the weight of it filling my heart. Having experienced depression, and the many pressures and terrors of life that can lead one to feel suicidal, I know now why some people take their own lives. To know that we, as people, have failed in helping someone to see that there is still some good in this world, that there is something worth living for even though things seem terrible now, is frustrating. I feel guilty that I was unable to do anything, even having never met him. I feel guilty that I am still alive, having made it through my darker hours of depression, while he did not.

Often when I find myself faced with these situations, I turn and cling frantically to my faith. Some days, it really does feel like the only thing I can be assured of in this life. I try to find comfort in different verses, but today, it is doing little to lift my spirits. I think, until I allow myself to properly mourn his death and actually cry, I will have trouble finding comfort in these verses. There's simply too much sadness. It's almost as though I cannot be comforted until I have made my sorrow known to the world around me, rather than keeping it bottled up inside as I am wont to do.

What verses have given you comfort in times of trouble? How has your faith helped you through the dark times?

~*~

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me."

Psalm 23:4