Springing Into Faith

Already into late fall in Minnesota, minimal time remained to plant spring flower bulbs. Frost wasn’t far off, rain was on the way and if I didn’t plant that weekend, I’d never get the job done.

My youngest daughter, Lucy, wanted to help. She inherited her grandmother’s gardening gene. I don’t possess that gene, but I do love the results of a good garden. Every once in a while, I get inspired. We grabbed our gloves, four bags of bulbs, a watering can, a trowel and a small hand-held bulb-planting tool I’d bought a few years before but never used.

Soon, heavy mist settled in and we couldn’t see more than a dozen yards away. But we kept working. Being ten years old, Lucy enjoyed digging in the dirt. She quickly mastered the art of the bulb digger. She loved carefully placing each tulip, daffodil and crocus bulb into its designated hole and nestling each into the freshly turned earth. I took on the job of covering each hole and patting down the dirt—“tucking them in for the winter” we called it.

As I tucked Lucy into bed that night, I praised and thanked her for her hard work. She replied, “I liked it. I would have liked it even if you told me I had to do it, but I wanted to do it.”

Oh, Lucy, how I love your honesty.

We talked a little then about how planting bulbs really is an act of faith. You dig holes, put bulbs in the ground—I always worry that I haven’t planted them deeply enough—you cover them under heaps of dirt and then you walk away. You don’t nurture them. You don’t water them. You just leave them there. In the earth. Forget about them. You let the snow pile on top of them and you give them to the Lord.

And then, along comes a spring afternoon, and suddenly you remember. You hear a bird chirping. It’s warm enough to leave your mittens in the house. The sun is warm, the breeze pleasant. You take a hopeful walk along your flowerbed and there, under the dead leaves and the last dregs of snow, the bulb you buried has done its job. Wee shoots of green poke out of the earth.

Spring has sprung.

This has been a long, hard winter with more snow and school closures than I’ve ever seen in my 25 years in Minnesota. Mountain ranges of snow appeared where mountains never before existed. There are times I’ve wondered if spring will ever arrive. I have faith that it will…but sometimes I admit I have almost despaired.

I feel like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, only instead of believing in spooks, I believe in spring. “I do believe in spring. I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do believe in spring.”

If I say it enough times I’ll believe it, right? If I say it enough times, I’ll really have faith.

Hebrews 11:1 (NIV) says this about faith: Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

We have confidence in our hope in Jesus, that He is real, that He died to save us, that He rose again, proving that He is God. We have confidence that He’ll return someday, even though we cannot yet see the results. We have confidence that God is working in our lives even when it sometimes takes longer than we wish. We have confidence that God’s timing is better than ours.

Likewise, I do, I do, I do have confidence that the mountain ranges of piled snow will melt. Confidence that warm temperatures will return. Confidence that those ugly, brown bulbs waiting in the frozen tundra will result in a beautiful, blossoming palette of color come May.

The reward of surviving a Minnesota winter is spring. I have faith that my reward is coming. Faith that God, in His timing, will bring to fruition the beauty that lies beneath the ground in each of those bulbs. Faith that He will bring to fruition the good things He is growing inside of me. Inside of Lucy. Inside each one of us.

Gretchen O’Donnell is an island girl living on the prairies of southwestern Minnesota with her husband, two youngest children and two argumentative cats. She eagerly awaits the coming of spring and can’t wait to have home-grown tulips on her kitchen table. Gretchen does freelance writing for her local newspaper and has a weekly faith-based newspaper column, The Disheveled Theologian. She loves telling stories of her ordinary life to help people see the theological truths in their own everyday lives.