Palm Sunday Thoughts

“Is it cold out?” my dad asked me when I got back from my walk this morning.

“It’s brisk,” I said, which probably sounded more like “It’s bwisk,” considering my lips were completely numb from the cold.

Welcoming springtime in Ohio is tough.  It’s cold, then slightly less cold.  It’s gray, then sunny, then gray again in the blink of an eye. 

It’s windy, then still and the most beautiful flowering trees I’ve seen turned out to be an invasive species that has been recently outlawed.

It’s seasonal whiplash.

Today is Palm Sunday and this week of Holy Week presents a spiritual whiplash.  Here we have Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem followed only days later by betrayal by his closest friends and crucifixion. 

It is a miserable, dark, and stormy season.

And yet, it always gives way to resurrection.

I am reminded of the little girl who ran past my open window some years ago on a particularly sunny, warm spring day in Florida.  As she chased her friend, she shouted out, “It smells like Easter down here!” 

What an amazing piece of knowledge—to know somewhere outside of the brain, somewhere deep in the heart, to the very spirit, the soul, that the smell of new growth, of fresh air, of turned dirt and flowers bending and turning to the sun—to know that this is Easter.

That Jesus is life.

Every morning, I step out onto the back deck of my dad and Barb’s house and look to the forest of trees on the other side of their fence.

There is a building green.

There is towering gray above, but there is a building green below.

And one morning, I will walk outside and the gray will have vanished overnight.

The sun will rise on new life.