The Hope of Spring

Yesterday, I saw a crocus bloom.  This unexpected stretch of unseasonably warm weather has given me the chance to do some garden chores, picking up last season's soaker hoses, rolling up plastic mulch, and enjoying the sunshine.  But seeing the first crocus of spring always brings me back to another time and place.

I was in my early 20's and was living in the Chicago area, going to my first seminary, Trinity (aka TEDS).  As a highly conflicted gay-and-evangelical when never-the-twain-could-meet young man, they were some of the worst years of my life.  I didn't know who I was.  What I suspected I was I didn't want to be, and my lifelong strategy of holding off my feelings with my theology and my intellect was breaking down.  I was ferociously depressed, and life and death hung in about equal attraction.

The one lifeline was my friend Maggie.  I had met her and her husband (a professor at the evangelical Wheaton College) when I was working in Sequoia National Park while in college.  She was my parent's age (so then in her mid-40's), had children my age, and for one of those inexplicable reasons that really only God can tell, took me under her wing.  In Sequoia, she and husband Paul taught me how to do inductive Bible study, to appreciate their gracious and generous hearted Calvinism, and to relish the intellectual stream of evangelical theology.  I also came out to her -- even though I'd never met another gay person (that I knew of), I knew what I felt and feared.  We corresponded for the rest of my time in college, had many long phone calls, before I moved to the Chicago area for seminary.  There, I enjoyed the refuge of their home on many occasions.

Their home backed to a large forest preserve, and we would take long walks exploring the rills and thickets.  Midwestern forests were entirely different than the Sierra forests I knew, with a whole understory of plants I'd never seen.  In winter, you could see quite a distance, and summer closed in with shrubs and vines to an inpenetrable maze.  But in the early spring, we had one main quest:  to find the first crocus.

The first crocus of spring:  a hope, a promise -- the depths of winter are ending, spring is but around the corner!  To my fear, Maggie assured me, "The grace of God will never abandon you." Of my pain, she promised, "This too shall pass."  She was right on both scores.  It is not too much to say that her love, prayers, care, and patient ear was what kept me alive for a couple crucial years.  We kept contact in the years since that difficult time, until she passed away a bit over a year ago.  But the care and wisdom of this mentor remain.

Who taught you to search for the first crocus of spring?  Who did God bring into your life at crucial times?  Or, who do you take under your wing, listen to, and share your wisdom?  And take crocus hunting?

(adapted from the version first published in the Plymouth Placard, March 2015)