Like many people during this pandemic, we’re spending a lot of our time outdoors! Our house is a short walk away from some woodland which we’ve escaped to for our permitted exercise. We enjoyed watching spring burst into life, the cool shade it provided on hot summer days and the spectacular autumn colours as the leaves started to fall. Saturday however, was a different story.
It felt like a very bleak winter’s day! The trees were bare and the muddy ground was carpeted with soggy decaying leaves. The wind was bitterly cold and ice crystals covered the tops of puddles. Everything seemed so cold and dead, and yet as we walked there was something I kept noticing. Poking up here and there through the mud, were shoots of green. The bluebells that we had enjoyed discovering in spring were already growing.
It seemed like the perfect metaphor for where we’d found ourselves. This winter’s Covid wave is seeing fatalities rise, the economic impact is growing every day and the interruption to all our lives is taking it’s toll as we lockdown again. It certainly seems to be a bleak winter, but as the vaccination program rolls out, the promise of spring is on the horizon.
It seemed like the perfect metaphor for where we’d found ourselves This winter’s Covid wave is seeing fatalities rise, the economic impact is growing every day and the interruption to all our lives is taking it’s toll as we lockdown again. It certainly seems to be a bleak winter, but as the vaccination program rolls out, the promise of spring is on the horizon.
In that moment I realised the metaphor spoke of more than just the pandemic.
Maybe as you read this you feel like your life is in a winter season. Maybe the fruit that once seemed so abundant in your business, relationships or health has been lost and everything feels very barren. But if that is where you find yourself today let me encourage you that you have seed in the ground!
The ideas and the dreams you have will grow. The habits and the routines you put in place will bear fruit. The values and passions you have will develop. The time you invest in nurturing relationships, or developing your own skills may not be making a visible difference yet, but underground things are growing.
You probably have more seed in the ground than you realise so take time to keep watering them and watch to see them grow! Spring is on its way!
It’s just like the saying “We should judge our lives not by what we reap, but what we sow.”
Good piece. Keep planting those seeds!
Thank you – and yes writing this post was an intentional seed planted!