Waiting

Flying to Michigan last week was, for me, an experience of moving backwards in seasonal time. I had just found my inner Spring and here the daffodils were just beginning to brighten the brown leaf covered garden beds. Here it is still cold and it is early spring. Winter doesn't seem to want to let go of her icy grip. Just before we arrived more than three inches of heavy wet snow fell. It still lies in melting dirty heaps at the edges of parking lots reminding me of cast off children's snowmen slowly returning to the earth. Erika asked "is it winter again?"

We are here to help when the new baby is born, tenderly tending big sister, Erika, who will no longer be the only kid in the house as well as to cook, drive and generally keep order. Our daughter-in-law is now very pregnant, tomorrow is her due date and she is ready for the new life to come. I see in her, as well as in the lilac bushes outside our house and in every growing living thing here in Michigan, the pulse of life. Life eager to burst forth and do what life does—grow into the fullness of what they are.

But today it is gray and cloudy again and I wonder if this Easter promise of new life is just a pipe dream. Waiting for new life, waiting for Spring once again, waiting for resurrection is challenging my patience. It is too easy to stop watching, to close my eyes and tell others to wake
me up when it is finally here. How difficult it is to remember to trust not only the promise, but the pulse of life, forever pushing forward, forever renewing, forever alive. Patience is such a hard thing to learn.