Then comes the sun...

There is nothing like the spring sun to awaken a soul.  You wake up one morning after a long winter and something is different, the world seems more cheery.  The sunshine seems brighter, crisper, warmer, and could it possibly be more yellow?  And with that change comes a whisper of hope, you can almost feel the new life beginning to stir and awaken.  I love the spring sunshine and the pure joy is seems to bath everything in.  The drab brown grass starts to look a little greener than even yesterday and it doesn't even look as cold outside (even if it is still below freezing) when spring sunshine is caressing everything around.  The sunshine changes our view of things when we look at them through the light it spreads.  Not unlike our view of the world through our human eyes and then with the lens of Christ.  With our human eyes the world can look so bleak and formidable.  Turn on the news and you will see stories of shootings, rapes, murders, and a lot of political hen pecking.  Even walking out our front door and into our neighborhoods the world doesn't seem as safe as it did when we were kids.  I used to play for hours outside running all over the neighborhood, checking in maybe once or twice with my mom.  I knew that when it got dark I was supposed to come home.  Now, I'm cautious to let my girls go to the park right across the street from our house.  When they ask to go to the park I go outside to see who else might be over there and assess whether I want my children exposed to those people.  How sad and depressing this seems.  What is our world coming, how much worse  can it get?  The answer is it can get much worse, but there is a hope at the end of the tunnel.  Much like that spring sunshine after the long winter.   That hope is an eternity with Jesus.  And when we look at the bleak world around us through his eyes we can see it a little differently, much like the brown grass looking a little green suddenly.  You see Jesus doesn't see everything as lost, but he sees everything as able to be restored one day.  Yes the bleakness of winter abounds, but the spring sunshine is coming. That can give us hope, no matter how cold the world may seem.