Grace Covers the Waiting

She sits in the snow, that blank white covering of silence and grace. The woods surrounding the garden are peaceful and still, only the steady drip of snow melting and the occasional call of a bird interrupting the quiet. She enjoys the great, vast solitude, calming her storms of anxiety and future planning.

She thinks of winter, no great feat in her immediate surroundings. She knows her thoughts aren’t original, but she appreciates that winter means rest and preparation time. Spring is coming. Stirring beneath the seemingly inactive ground is a flurry of things preparing to spring forth and grow. The snow weighs it down until the proper time, covers up the preparation so she doesn’t focus on what will be, but simply rests and enjoys things that are.

Winter of the spirit is like that too. She is in a winter, literally and figuratively. Things that didn’t seem to be a big deal are setting the scene for other things to happen. She’s had the time to rest, to be still, to know God, to hear Him. She can afford to wait. This isn’t the season for things to happen, but for her to rest before they do. She thinks she needs the periods in between. She needs the beats between her words for God to speak. She still doesn’t know what the future holds and she doesn’t like that, but it’s okay to wait. It’s okay not to know. It’s okay to trust.

Breath frosts the air out of her mouth and she watches it dissipate like her worries. Grace covers her anxious feelings like snow covers the waiting ground. It’s not perfectly peaceful. It’s cold, it’s inconvenient, and it seems to last forever. But she doesn’t want to rush through the beauty and the stillness. Let grace cover me, she thinks, a garment weighted with necessity and mercy. Observe the quiet majesty of the season, of the ancient ways, the cyclical need for rest, like the Jubilees that never were.

She’s heard a lot of other people get excited about how winter is ending. Spring is coming. What else could she add to their thoughts but the caution that winter is important and essential in and of itself. It shouldn’t be rushed through to get to spring. Winter isn’t just to be endured. Winter is the time to be still, to hear, and to rest. It will be hard to leave that once spring comes. And it should be. Don’t discount the benefits of winter.

She stands, moves to leave. It is time to face the world, to leave the oasis of snow and silence. But she stops, a hint of purple catching her eye. She moves to find the color fully and spots a single purple flower, star petals reaching out in the middle of the path, desolation around it.

She inhales softly, not wanting to disturb the fragile scene of beauty. The flower means everything to her in that moment.

“I have to be this small flower,” she whispers. “I have to be this little purple flower peeking up all by itself in the middle of the ground. There's no reason it should be here, except that it's clearly been growing for a while. All around it is snow and dead leaves and signs that it's still winter. But that flower is here.”

It is here. Beautiful, vibrant, glowing. It's surviving, despite its circumstance. No idea what will become of it. No idea what it is even. But it is there, and it gives her hope.

It is a symbol of what she needs so desperately in her life. She silently begs the flower to gleam and glow and grow. Let it restore what she lost. She doesn’t want to forget.

If this flower can do it, so can she. No matter what kind of pain she is in, no matter what kind of sorrow she feels or how lonely she is. She exists. Just like the flower.

The flower that doesn't know that just down the road of time are a whole bunch of other purple flowers blooming, growing, and gleaming, brightly shining, spreading out. For now, it is alone, even though it seems impossible. But God is sustaining that flower, and God is sustaining her in the middle of the wilderness, in the middle of Lent, in the middle of isolation, in the middle of pain.

He brings her such beauty, and she has to embrace it. She has to remember it.

The snow blankets all else as she walks back to her car, under the grace of a Savior whose very word breathed that flower into existence in a garden shaped like a calendar. A garden where she tiptoes down the snowy bricks and knows dates are etched on each one. She walks down one day and the next and the next and the next. And she can walk those bricks so much faster than she can live the days they represent. But she knows, no matter what happens, like each new brick, each new day will come. The flowers will bloom at the right time of year. There's beauty at every point, even in the dirt and the winter.