…Look around you: Winter is over; the winter rains are over, gone! Spring flowers are in blossom all over. The whole world’s a choir—and singing! Spring warblers are filling the forest with sweet arpeggios. Lilacs are exuberantly purple and perfumed, and cherry trees fragrant with blossoms. Oh, get up, dear friend, my fair and beautiful lover—come to me! Come, my shy and modest dove— leave your seclusion, come out in the open…. Song of Solomon 10:14 (The Message)

The saying goes, “Everybody complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” Yes, it has been a dreary winter – rain, sleet, snow, more rain. But who are we to grumble? God knows what we need even when we don’t. God knows all things – whether it will be an arid summer where the ground needs water stored up or not. When I was a young child, farmers would come in my daddy’s country store complaining about the dry spell. “Our crops will never come up unless we get some rain,” they would say. The rain would come. Then some of these same men would complain, “That rain is washing our crops away.” I asked my dad, “Can’t these men ever be satisfied with the weather?” My dad chuckled, “If it weren’t the weather, they would find something else to grip about.”

Let’s be people who can sing and smile through the rain because we know the sun will shine again.

I love the beginning of spring. Wild jonquils stick their brave heads up through cold ground (sometimes even through the snow), just to remind us that something better is in store. As black, dead-looking trees send out new blossoms, we are reminded of the resurrection and that God makes all things new. Spring songs are sung by the chirping birds. In the spring season, nature echoes God’s promise that when these old bodies seem to die, He actually makes them sprout anew into life eternal.

A young girl asked her father, “How old is your mother?”

“She was 83 when she died.”

“But I mean how old is she now,” replied the child, who understood her grandmother lived on, even after she was buried. (Kids get it before adults do sometimes.)

My niece recently told me of a dream she had of my mother after her earthly death. “She was walking up the steps at church, looking beautiful in a red dress. I said to her, ‘Mama Willie, I thought you were dead.’ She replied, ‘No Sweetie, I’m very much alive.’”

One warm spring day, back when ladies wore hats to church, my friend’s mother came to church wearing her new spring flower-adorned topper. Someone raised the windows to make the auditorium comfortable. Just as the preacher began his sermon, a bluebird flew in the window and perched itself amidst the flowers on her hat. That harbinger of spring brought many laughs.

Flowers, birds, Easter frocks, and more signal spring. Let’s be thankful and quit complaining and sing of the Lord, even on rainy days.