Once upon a time there was a man who lived his whole life in Tahiti. He enjoyed the weather and didn't own anything warmer than a flannel shirt. One day he received a phone call saying his aunt had died and left him a wheat farm in Nebraska. So he packed up his few things and boarded a plane for America. The crop was growing well. He kept an eye on his neighbors and when they watered, he watered. When they weeded, he weeded. People at the General Store asked how he was getting on and he always smiled and said "Just fine". By late summer the wheat was ripe and he harvested a good crop. He liked farming. Then by November things were getting colder. He wore three t-shirts, but had no idea about storm windows and furnaces. He couldn't figure out how other folks were staying warm but he wasn't about to ask. The fields looked pretty bleak, so he watered more at night, until the hoses froze. Leaves were covering the fields so he tried to sweep them. Then just when things seemed awful white stuff started falling from the sky, suffocating the frozen wheat stalks. He did his best to shovel it but the wind kept scattering it. He was really cold at night and the potatoes and carrots in the root cellar were running out. Neighbors wondered why he never wore a coat, but didn't want to be nosy. By February everything seemed hopeless. He had only been on the farm a few months but he had killed it. Cold, exhausted and ashamed he put up a For Sale sign and went back to Tahiti. The End.

What is so sad about that story is that he would have really loved the coming of spring. Each tiny sprout, now silent under the snow, was about to yawn and push its way into the light. Miracles were just around the frosty corner, waiting to waft in on the first Chinook. New life lay poised within eggs, dens and the tips of cherry trees. His farm wasn't dead. It was only sleeping.

How often do we look at our marriages and pronounce them lifeless? We can all splash in the first rains of April, and bury our face in a wave of daffodils, but do we respect the seasons that precede and feed it? Spring is not an entity unto itself. It is part of a cycle that includes and depends on hibernation, fallow time and migration. The wonder of geese coming back implies that they left in the first place. To celebrate the peeping dogwood blossoms you have to have seen stark branches.

The Lord came into a world that was as bitter as a Nebraska winter, as austere as a frozen pond. But that backdrop of desperation doesn't diminish the phenomenon, it intensifies it. The value of a quilt goes up in proportion as the temperature goes down. Our appreciation of our spouse is moderate in good times, inestimable in troubled ones.

To celebrate the Lord's coming in your very bones is to have seen the starkness of your own soul, to shudder at the chill of your own selfishness, to hear the faint honking of life returning. It is in the wake of that cavernous void that the angels sang. To a world perched precariously on the borders of death, came the first heavenly Chinook, a message not yet cooled from its source in the Sun of God.

Photo by Chara Odhner

www.caringformarriage.org