Thoughts On A Snowdrop
Elaine Utting
Where I live there is a tree growing in the pavement outside my house. We love watching the seasons change - new growth in spring, full leaf in summer, the falling leaves in the autumn.
But one of the downsides is those falling leaves clogging up our little front garden. They settle on the borders where snowdrops and daffodil bulbs are waiting underground to brighten our spring days.
Last winter I didn’t seem to have the time or energy to clear them away. I left the leaves in a thick layer, getting more dense and waterlogged in the rain.
When spring came around,I thought I’d better clear the leaves and give the snowdrops a chance.
What a sad sight! The plants had been trying hard to grow as they were made to do. But instead of growing up straight, they’d bent and twisted to try to make their way through the leaves pressing down on them. And without any sunlight the leaves were pale and yellow instead of a nice fresh green.
A few days later though, with that heavy blanket of leaves lifted away and some sun and air, they were already stronger, straighter and greener - well on their way to being the lovely plants they were created to be.
That picture of the twisted underdeveloped shoots came to me in a meeting recently. I felt it held a message, and as I pondered, some thoughts relating to our emotional and spiritual lives came to mind. They’re not new, but for me it’s good to remember them.
If we have experienced hardship in our early lives, natural or spiritual, it will have an effect on our growth, emotional or spiritual, and probably both.
This has certainly been true for me.
We may have been oppressed by difficult relationships. We may have been prevented from fulfilling our hopes and dreams by illness, poverty, or lack of opportunity. We may even have made choices ourselves that have limited us.
But we have a God who wants to lift the oppression, give us new opportunities, heal our hearts, forgive our foolish choices.
Luke’s gospel, chapter 4, says that Jesus began his work of healing and teaching by publicly reading these words from the book of the prophet Isaiah:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour ’
Luke 4: 18-19
And then Jesus said that those words were about him; that this was what he had come to do.
And he’s still doing it now. As we welcome him into our lives, he’s working to release us from the things that hold us back.
It may be a totally spontaneous experience out of the blue, he may use something we read, a snatch of a song, a word from a friend, a sermon, a prayer with someone we trust. These are just a few of the ways he works in our lives.
Sometimes it happens slowly, even over years, and sometimes it happens in a moment, like the lifting of the leaves from the snowdrops.
However it happens, when it does, like the snowdrops, we’re freed to grow a little more into what we were created for.
