The Ice Will Melt

by Donna Poole

Spring finally arrived, and I didn’t care.

Kimmee, our youngest daughter, knows how much I usually love springtime. Just as she has done every year since she was a little girl, she took me outside and pointed out all the first signs of spring. I nodded. I smiled.

And I felt nothing.

The cold numbness encasing my heart frightened me. What’s wrong with me? Where’s my usual springtime joy, my delight in the warm breezes, the birds calling to their mates, the first flowers turning adoring faces to the sun?

I felt even more afraid when I realized I didn’t feel much emotional response to anything. Me! Donna! The person who, had I been born a punctuation mark, would have been the exclamation point! Now I was just the ellipsis, the dot dot dot, the yawn, the nothing.

I. Felt. Nothing.

Perhaps the open brain surgery I’d had a few months before had changed me forever; I’d never be my exuberant self again. I took myself back inside and had a serious sit-down with me, myself, and I. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt emotionally numb, was it? My wounded brain struggled back through its maze of memories. I’d felt this way other times, after great emotional pain and loss. Joyful feelings had eventually returned, though in a more chastened, less exuberant form, making a quieter, gentler, and perhaps more compassionate me. I’d heal from this brain surgery. The ice around my heart would melt. And the ice did melt, but not that spring.

Cancer treatment has sometimes left me feeling wintery too. I understand aggressive cancer requires aggressive chemo, but …I’ll just leave the ellipsis, the dot dot dot, and you can fill in the blanks.

Life’s blows hurt and may make us wonder if spring will ever return. Nothing wounds the heart more than the death of a loved one. As a dear friend says, “For a Christian, death is a defeated enemy, but make no mistake; it is still the enemy.

From the depths of physical suffering or of emotional grief, God’s children cry out, “Lord, to my heart bring back the springtime!”

If you, through faith in Jesus Christ, are one of God’s crying children, I can’t promise you the ice will melt in this life, but I can promise the ice will melt. An eternal spring is coming. When it does, a north wind will never again freeze a tear on your cheek. Love will never again frame the bitter word, “Goodbye.”

I wish I could describe God’s eternal spring to you, but I don’t know much myself. God tells us only a little about it, but the little is enough to give us a sturdy hope no ice storm is strong enough to kill.

“And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” –Revelation 21:3-4

Songs of the Spring Days

“A gentle wind, of western birth

On some far summer sea,

Wakes daises in the wintry earth,

Wakes hope in wintry me.

“The sun is low; the paths are wet,

And dance with frolic hail;

The trees—their springtime is not yet—

Swing sighing in the gale.

“Young gleams of sunshine peep and play;

Clouds shoulder in between;

I scarce believe one coming day

The earth will all be green.

“The north wind blows, and blasts, and raves,

And flaps his snowy wing;

Back! Toss thy bergs on arctic waves;

Thou cans’t not bar our spring.” –George MacDonald

See you in the spring, my friend. Don’t pack your winter coat; you won’t be needing it!