Daffodils and Dust

 Spring has arrived! In our garden the spring flowers are blooming and colour is beginning to return after the white-out of much of the winter. There is still the reminder of aridity as the borders look sparse, awaiting the abundance of summer. This year the garden has been cleared of more weeds than before and we are seeing plants that we had not previously noticed, and so the surprises keep coming as new shoots push through and we wonder what they might become.

The daffodils are surrounded by the dust of the bare soil. We are in spring and also in lent, that time of the year when we turn our thoughts to desert and wilderness. The recent words of a colleague started me thinking about this strange juxtaposition: spring and Lent, daffodils and dust. Strange, but perhaps also very familiar because life is so often just like this. There are moments of joy and hope in and among moments of sadness and even despair. As we see the images on our television and computer screens and in the newspapers; images from Japan, Bahrain, Libya, and   from our own immediate neighbourhoods we share in the dust and arid times and we pray through them and with our neighbours. And, even in those images there are the moments of hope, those rescued against all the odds, those working to alleviate human suffering.
The daffodils are coming into bloom, transforming the dust around them. In due course, the soil will be hardly visible as the daffodils and other flowers flourish.
Daffodils and dust: 
Despair and hope;
Death and resurrection.

We journey through Lent towards Easter in anticipation and with the assurance that hope and life will prevail.
Thanks be to God!
Ruth.