I woke up this morning to the rumble of thunder and a nagging headache – a sure sign that the day would be dreary.
As I dodged raindrops running out to the car to take my youngest to school this morning, I shivered. It was supposed to be the first day of spring, yet it was cold, damp and dreary. Definitely not what I think of when I hear the word spring.
The truth is, though, even though I’d like to think of spring as tulips and daffodils shyly opening their petals and gentle sunshine, that’s usually not what it is like here in Northwest Ohio. March, which heralds the start of spring, is a notoriously ugly month, weather-wise.
The grass is brown and soggy. Usually, you can find small clumps of grey, dirty snow which hasn’t quite disappeared yet, the pristine white sparkle long gone.
My backyard becomes a soupy mess of mud and the melting snow reveals all those times I didn’t get the yard pooper-scoopered.
Everything looks brown and wet and muddy and ugly, but something is going on that we can’t see just yet.
Before we can get to the trees budding out and the flowers opening their petals and the gentle sunlight, there needs to be rain and mud.
In the midst of all the messiness, growth is taking place.
Growth, whether in nature or in our own lives, is messy and often not very pretty. I know, I want growth to fit neatly into my planner. I want to capture it in a perfect Instagram picture with just the right filter, but that isn’t the truth of things, is it?
Instead, on the surface of our lives is the mess, We find ourselves walking through the mud puddles of difficulty. We feel like we can’t find the light and everything is brown and rainy and dreary.
We can’t see what God is doing beneath the surface. We can’t see the root growth that needs to happen before the time of blooming.
But, if we can just pull on our rain boots and persevere through all the mud and messiness, we’ll see that growth. One day, the rain will stop, and we’ll see green shoots poking out of the still damp earth. Beautiful buds will appear that couldn’t have blossomed without the root growth that took place before.
How about you? Are you walking through a particularly messy or muddy time in your life? Does it seem like rain will be in your spiritual forecast forever? Take heart! God is doing the deep root growth in your life. The season of blooming is coming!
1 Comment on When Growth is Messy
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Oh girl, so much mud and mess. 🙂 And so much good stuff in the middle of it.
Thank you for this reminder. 🙂