One of the great delights of parenting is experiencing a shared joy with our children. Who among us hasn’t impressed one of our own passions onto our kid just so we can experience it through their eyes? Well, if it’s just me, I’m not ashamed. My oldest child has recently fallen in love with reading (yay! yay! yay!), and you can bet I jumped all over that. We read “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” together, and I can’t imagine a more captivating experience. Now that my book-nerdiness is on full display, I’d like to share a bit from C.S. Lewis’s text that has me thinking.
“Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms… Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on the forest floor and overhead you could see blue sky between the treetops.”
What a beautiful description of spring ascending onto Narnia. It seemed winter (literally and figuratively) would last forever, and then, aha! It thawed at long last. The spring thaw in Narnia was not equal to instantaneous peace. But surely it was a sign of the days to come. In the shifting seasons there is beauty — from hardship and sacrifice to renewal, freedom, and goodness. And as I read and reread the passage above, I hold tight to this truth: there is great joy ahead.
We are presently in one of those times of the year. Conferences. Daylight saving time steals an hour of sleep. The gloomy gray skies weigh heavily on our spirits. State Tests loom in the not-so-distant future, and so on and so on. A lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifice make it difficult to imagine carefree days and the warmth of the sun. But take hope, there is great joy ahead. Just hold on a little longer, keep doing your thing, keep praising those kiddos, and in all the ways you know how, rock on, my friends.