Heavy Winter, Hopeful Dawn

This has been a heavy winter. It’s felt especially dark, challenging, confusing, and stacked with suffering. This whole world heaves its weary chest, ragged breaths drawn from a rundown stretch of months, years.

We all have our pain, our heaviness, the rise and fall of fear and anxiety, the spread of questions gone unanswered, relief seemingly far off. Where do we run to find our way? The way seems run down.

But hope will not stay buried. Even when it’s piled down, hope still springs, still gives a lift to the weight. It shifts the heaviness from our shoulders, loosens the grip we have on weariness, angst, anger, grief, and confusion. Like the turn of light now in the later evening sky, God stays illuminated longer. We lift our eyes to the streaks of color turning in the sky, trace the outline of pines and oaks in the distance and choose to say, “Come, Lord Jesus. Be our refuge. Give us Your yoke you promise is easy.” He promises to exchange our heavy for His lightness, His Spirit gentle as He soothes our sores.

We’ve all been so sore for a long time, and we are done with it. This heavy won’t subside, but we can hand it off to the One whose shoulders are meant to carry it.//

Yes, it’s been a heavy winter. But up ahead holds a hopeful dawn. Spring is coming. The light is here. We’ve been waiting for weeks and months, and now, true to the natural rhythm of this world, time shifts, light shifts, and the biting wind and ice subside. Hallelujah, let that light come to melt this frozen world, melt frozen hearts, and warm the ones who just want to get out of the elements and stop their shivering.

Give us relief, our great God. We shouldn’t feel this heavy. We long for the softness and strength of Your arms, the pastel promises of the sky that brighter days are ahead.

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Continuing my attempt at the Five Minute Friday weekly writing challenge. Five minutes to write on the assigned topic. Raw and unedited. (Yikes!) This week’s topic: Heavy.   // symbolizes where five minutes started and/or stopped.