This is what God says…    
“Forget about what’s happened;
don’t keep going over old history.
Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it? Isaiah 43:19 The Message

Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it? 

How I love these words! In January I hang onto them like rope in a blizzard. Why? Because there are days during these dark weeks of winter when I struggle to believe they’re true. Will a thousand shades of green really burst forth to brighten these muddy fields? Can something new actually come forth from me, as sluggish and depressed as I often feel when the sun rarely shines?

I recently found some new words to help me through these dark days between Christmas and Epiphany. They’re from Margaret Silf’s book, Inner Compass: An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality.

“Sin is, perhaps, like holding a daffodil bulb in our hands but neglecting to plant it in our life’s soil because we refuse to believe that it contains a flower. Yet alongside all of our flat refusals to believe, the Gardener plants us nonetheless, and tends us lovingly because he knows who we are and holds everything we shall become in his gentle hands.”

As I sit with this image of myself as a daffodil bulb in the Gardener’s hands, a poem glimmers in the shadows. Slowly, slowly, I pull it out of my gray-soaked brain.

The bulb looks old.

Shrunken.

Wizened.

Dead.

Its roots bedraggled, limp.

Why bother planting you

in this field of mud, I ask.

What good can come of the grave?

And yet,

the Master Gardener

plucks you from a pile,

passes you gently from palm to palm

as if to stimulate

your life’s blood.

He plants you in a prepared

plot of earth,

sprinkles you with bone meal

and clods of dirt.

He closes his eyes and smiles

as yellow bursts

forth in his mind’s eye…

Yellow as real as the shovel he holds.

Yellow as real as his mud-caked boots.

Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?

I believe, Lord. Forgive my unbelief.

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