January, February, March

January, February, March

If you live in a place that experiences four seasons, you have probably had a lull around January, February, or March.

January

January is desperately tough, because you have just started a “New Year”, but Christmas has already gone!  You have the post-Christmas blues and exhaustion with typically little or no time off work.  You have snow without the expectation of a white Christmas.  And you have bitter weather, even more bitter that December . . . but the cute wool scarfs, crotcheted hats, special gloves, trendy coat, and new boots have lost their fashion sheen.

Or, if you’re like me, you have your same ugly black sleeping-bag-coat with the broken zipper, scads of cheapie gloves laying around with no match, as-seen-in-no-fashion-magazine earmuffs made out of faux fleece, and you are faced with the difficult question, “Do I wear this stuff or freeze?”

The Christmas candies are all gone; there are no more mystery presents to be opened (if you were so fortunate as to have someone wrap you a present in the first place); the heat bill is costing you a fortune; the credit card bills have just come in; the bank account is looking mighty empty; and it’s hard to find anybody in a particularly cheerful mood.

February

By February, the techno-modern gadgets bought at Christmas after countless hours of standing in line or searching Ebay are now ‘virtually’ outdated, you look at the snow and think, ‘Like, why are you still here?’, and everybody starts shopping for outrageously expensive amputated flowers for Valentine’s Day.

That too-neony color of red is everywhere, and for those of us who aren’t dating or married, we get to parade past everybody’s love-nesting ads and think how we would like to have somebody to give one of those magnetic kissing giraffes to and keep the other one for ourselves.  We maybe even scheme about how we could buy the pair of kissing giraffes and hide one where nobody would think to look and set the other one on our desk at work so people might think we aren’t the total loser we feel like we are around Valentine’s Day.

March

And then, by March, you’ve actually started missing mosquitoes.  Nobody is getting married.  There are no cool social events planned until Spring Break—and that’s only if you have a kid in school or if you’re in college or you take the week off.

The trend is to buy new t-shirts for the summer that doesn’t seem to be anywhere near.  You think about being on a beach somewhere that a pile of work can’t follow.  If you have Daylight Saving’s Time, an hour gets clipped off, probably out of your sleep, but at least you do get to see more sun.

There doesn’t seem to be anything happening in the yard.  The possible ice and freezing rain doesn’t make for pleasant flower-growing.  No tomatoes just bursting with flavor or sunflowers just bursting with color.  There is, however, that hummingbird lawn ornament you bought a year back when you thought getting an LED hummingbird for $6.97 was somehow a great deal and was really going to compliment your life.

On TV you get to watch people escaping to far away places and doing fun things and you’re thinking, “Is this entertainment or torment?”

You may start to ask yourself questions like:

• What am I doing here?
• Why am I not having any fun?
• Why does life seem to be so hard?
• Is there any reason to try again since I broke my New Year’s Resolution on January 2^nd?

People sometimes say winter weather and less light can be factors in depression and gloom.  But it’s way more than cold or darkness.

It’s the loss of distraction.  It’s an awareness of mortality.  It’s a loneliness of heart.

Sometimes it’s even a belief that nothing good will come, or can come.

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“Always Winter, But Never Christmas[1]“

Although the focus of the world and even many Christians seems to be December 25 . . . and then the summer . . . and then December 25 . . . we miss the best day of all, an in-between day in late March or early April, following the hardest, coldest, darkest months of the year . . . Easter.

Christianity is not actually a faith centered around Christmas.  It is a faith centered around Easter.

We don’t know the month or day when Christ was born.  But we do know when He died.  The Bible tells us He died the night of the Jewish Passover sacrifice of a perfect lamb (see Matthew 26:17, Mark 14:1, Mark 14:12, Luke 22:7,  John 11:55, John 18:28) an event that occurred in what would be our March or April.  He was resurrected three days later.

Now I know Jewish weather is not the same as weather in the midwest USA.  But I also believe in an all-knowing God, and I couldn’t think of a better time for Christ to come to life than when earth is broken from its winter cycle into the freedom of spring.

Sometimes in the dreary winter months it feels like “always winter, but never Christmas” as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.  But what we forget is that Christmas is not the best part of the story.

Easter is.

[1] The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, page 117, 118, 128, 136, 137.  Google books.