Getting to Nebraska, we passed a lot of dry, brown land.  Colorful Colorado was a grayish tan.  But here and there bright green fields told you things were ready to burst out at the first fall of rain.

On the surface things can look bleak.  Beneath the surface, they are ready to pop. What I have to keep reminding myself is that life is thriving on planet Earth.  God is in His heaven and that makes all the difference.  Somewhere the bountiful and beautiful is happening, maybe not here, perhaps in distant, hidden places, but it’s happening and its abundant!  While, there are dry spells, and dormant periods with things that go wrong, other things are so very right.

Change, for all my discomfort, is as ordinary as air. I know that if it’s happening, at very least, God is permitting it. He always has a plan and I don’t understand simply because He hasn’t run it past me.  That does make even the present dilemma a work in progress – mysterious design and all that.

In the world or in the Church, it all hangs together.  We are waiting for rain.  John Paul II spoke of a Springtime for the Church and I believe that now, in this very dark hour, we are actually living it.  Beneath the materialism and relativism and all those other ism’s, is a harvest in the making. It waits, perhaps, on laborers and a rain of prayer, but it none-the- less is hanging fire.

I find my Springtime in my prayer.  Whether my experience of prayer is dry or consoling, doesn’t matter, anymore.  I am praying.  Day by day, I’m just doing it…. and I’m not alone in this.  Whoever is waiting on change can actually move the hands of God in His heaven, turning the dreary grey of their waiting, into a poppin’ Springtime.

For me, it’s hidden but it’s happening.  For each of us, it’s a “Just do it!” thing, hanging on a decision.  What you don’t see, none-the-less, is building beneath the surface of our day to day.  Days past, present and to come, days for forgiving, repenting, and imploring; all prayer, all the time. Springtime will come without me, but don’t want to miss it.  I want to run through the fields and feel it in my soul.