It’s that new smell. Fresh air. Warm wind. Bright flowers and chirping birds. You’d think it would get old after years and years of the same thing. We’ve all lived through season changes. I’ve seen more than one spring. But it still surprises me. I still get caught off guard, walking down the sidewalk, and all of a sudden realizing it's here. It’s gradual but sudden. You don’t realize the seasons are changing until they’ve changed.

Winter is always the longest season for me. The days are shorter and you can’t sit outside and you get snowed in and everything just feels stagnant. There’s no growth, nothing changes. This is why I love the season of spring. Everything is new. Everything is changing and growing and being planted and nourished and budding. The sun was there all winter, but its warmth felt far away. Now with the start of a new season, it feels close. It feels personal. There’s a difference between Winter sun and Spring sun.

Time is funny like that, too. It comes in the middle of the night just like the changing of the seasons. It catches me just as off guard as the transition from winter to spring. But just as one season changes to the next, so too does life ebb and flow and transition and change. And just as the sun is constantly shining in the winter and the spring, so too is God constant then and now.

If that’s not comforting, then I don’t know what is. First off, that no season lasts forever. But even more so that we get to serve a God who is present in all seasons, the cold ones and the warm ones and the piling up of snow and the bright new flowers.

So even though winter may have been full of winter things, of snow and layers of clothes and never getting warm enough and days feeling all too short, wpring is here; longer days and that sweet new smell and the reassurance that the sun brings that no dark thing lasts forever.

In the middle of the semester how comforting it is to be reminded that there is more than just these patterns of life that become mundane and repetitive. But there are adventures and road trips and sunny days ahead. So winter, thank you for lessons and dark days and the beauty of the snow. Spring, I am excited for all the newness that you bring, the breath of fresh air that you provide, and the promise of warmth ahead. Until then, I’m taking time to not let the transitions of the seasons go unnoticed. I’m watching the flowers bloom and smelling the wind that blows by as the old heads out and the new rushes in. In more ways than one, transitions are good. They are sweet reminders of all that these seasons mean and all the ways that time is moving and the sun is shining. The transitions provide time for reflection and the opportunity to leave things behind. But you can’t do any of that if you forget to recognize the seasons and all that they are. So winter, I am happy to leave you behind for a few months. Spring, I am excited for all that you bring.

Psalms 104:19 He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows it’s time for setting.