Seeing the first signs of life outdoors in spring is fitting for the Easter season
As an outdoors person, I've never been a big fan of spring in Wisconsin.
It always seemed like the worst time of year to do anything outside. If it’s warm, it rains, and trails are flooded or muddy. If it’s cold, there’s spirit-crushing snow.
But then there’s that day. You know the one. We hit 70 degrees, there’s not a cloud in the sky and the breeze is light. You throw open every window in the house and take a deep breath of that fresh, almost-summer air. It smells like everything good in life.
A few years ago that day came in mid-March, and I had to soak it in through more than an open window. So my sister, her now-husband and I went to Grant Park to hike the Seven Bridges Trail.
The trees had not started budding and it was too early for wildflowers, so the landscape was brown and dormant. But it was warm and we were outside.
Then we came around a bend in the trail and I saw it: a carpet of vibrant green plants covering a patch of brown hillside. They weren't particularly dazzling, just simple ground cover, but I stopped in awe because I knew it was too early in the season for anything to be growing. What was it? Where did it come from? How could anything be growing already, on this first warm day of the season?
We kept hiking and saw more of the little green plants, the only signs of life on the sleeping forest floor. They were a beacon of hope after a long, dark, cold winter.
The fact that I’m still thinking about them three years later is a sign of how much that burst of green left an imprint on my psyche, which weathered its own dark winter last year after a health scare.
Seeing and believing
If you’re a person of faith, it’s easy to see God in majestic landscapes: panoramic mountain vistas, gushing waterfalls, oceanic sunsets.
John Muir, who spent his childhood in Wisconsin before venturing West to advocate for protecting wild places, saw the divine in such landscapes as well:
"Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God," Muir wrote in "My First Summer in the Sierra."
But grand vistas aren't the only sights that can move someone to belief. I've been thinking this Easter about those little green shoots.
I believe in God for many reasons, including those moments I see him reflected in beautiful places. On that spring day, I saw that divinity on a smaller scale, in a county park in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Until recently I didn’t think about how fitting it was that I saw it around Easter, the day in the Christian faith that celebrates life after death.
Before the joy of Easter came the bleakness of Good Friday. Jesus’ disciples and followers watched him suffer a brutal death on a cross. The disciples were at their lowest point. They believed their messiah was going to be a worldly conqueror, rescuing them from Roman rule and oppression. But Jesus had become just another victim of foreign rulers.
At the Last Supper, the meal Jesus shared with his disciples before being crucified, Jesus warned them of what was to come. He said that soon they wouldn’t see him, but then that they would see him again.
Then they watched him betrayed by one of his followers, humiliated, brutalized, killed on a cross and put into a tomb. Their conqueror had seemingly been conquered.
But Jesus didn’t come to conquer kings.
He had told them what to expect, but belief is a tricky thing. We’re inclined to doubt things we don’t or can’t understand.
Imagine the joy the disciples felt when Jesus stood before them again. He came to conquer death.
Like Thomas, who had to see and feel the wounds to believe it was really Jesus, we often don't believe things until we experience them ourselves.
When I was diagnosed with brain cancer last year, I saw God in the outpouring of love and support from friends and strangers. I saw him in the wisdom and skill of the doctors and nurses who treated me. I saw him in the peace I felt with whatever happened.
As I continue treatment and walk out of one of my life's darkest moments, I step into the warmth of that first 70-degree day to see a reminder of life springing from death.
No matter how much science you know and how deeply you understand photosynthesis, watching green grow out of lifeless dirt is miraculous.
Those little green plants I spotted that March day defied logic by unexpectedly popping up from the ground.
I’ll walk back into the woods this Easter season looking for that visceral reminder that death is not the end.