Daffodils and Living Hope
“I am the resurrection and the life.
He who believes in me will live.”
John 11:25 (NIV)
March is one of my favorite times of the year in Alabama. The sun is bright, the breeze is cool, and the days are getting longer with the promise of Easter just around the corner. Tulips and daffodils wave in the wind across my friend Rebekah’s beautiful garden. New growth is emerging, and the flowering trees, especially the redbud and dogwood trees, are in full blossom. The azaleas are about to pop just in time for Easter. After five months of cold gray skies, brown ground, and bare branches, suddenly our neighborhood has become a portrait of living color.
I’ve always had a love affair with daffodils, mainly because my Mama loved and planted them in our backyard when I was a child. Daffodils were always our first flowers of the Spring, a welcome reminder that warmer and longer days were coming soon. Mama often cut her daffodils and brought them in to brighten our kitchen. The happy little flowers usually brightened our moods as well.
Spring always reminds me of Mama. Not the Mama who eventually lost her words and her memory, but my Mama- the builder, the planter, the matriarch of our family. The strong Mama who encouraged things to grow and rejoiced when they did. The Mama who planted things with a vision, not for what they were when they were first planted, but for what they could become. Mama did that with her family; the hundreds of children she mentored at her elementary school; the homes she built; the gardens she planted; the plants she nurtured; and the faith she grew.
A couple of years before she died, I took Mama for a long drive along the mountain ridge of two local suburban communities. The dogwood trees were in full bloom and the neighborhoods were bursting with the colors of spring. Her memory was already beginning to fail her after a series of small strokes, but Mama suddenly turned reflective as we neared the end of that drive.
"Anybody who doubts the reality of the resurrection and life after death has never really considered Spring and the life that bursts forth when everything seems dead," Mama declared firmly.
God used jonquils that day to remind me of our hope in Christ and the reality of the resurrection. Mama's body is dead and lies in a grave, but her spirit and her faith, much like her beloved jonquils, live on. So does James Bruce.
Jesus Christ didn’t just die on the cross; he also rose from the grave. Without the resurrection of Easter Sunday, Black Friday would be just another Friday. But with Jesus’ resurrection, everything changes. The resurrection is the Great Reversal. Jesus rose from the grave to give us a new birth and a living hope (1 Peter 1:3). Author Tim Keller writes, “Faith in the resurrection implants that hope into the root of our souls.”
Ultimately, we can hold onto hope because Christ holds onto us. He is our only true hope in both life and death. And Easter is indeed the holiday of hope. Because Christ lives, we will too!