Keep looking upward

“I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”
Charlotte Bronte

(the hope of a bright blue Georgia morning sky / Julie Cook / 2014)

Despite this being the beginning of a new calendar year, we are actually in mid stride of a season which consists of long shadows, short days, frigid air, and barren lands.

Winter.

Christmas and Chanukah have each, with their magic and light, come and gone.

The joy and thrill of that first snow is all but a forgotten titillating memory. . .as I think the entire Country is now, not only over the idea of snow, but bordering on vengeful, wrathful, loathsome.

Our upbeat steps now slow and deliberate bordering on a dutiful trudge.

Our shoulders slump under the weary weight of the added wool, polly-fiber-fill and down loft, of sweaters, jackets, coats, scarves, gloves and mittens.

The relentless snow, cold, wind, rain, sleet, fog has all but sucked the life out of the now nearly broken victims otherwise known as those of us of the Northern Hemisphere.

Yet just when we think we can’t face one more bleak, dreary, grey, dangerously frozen day, something amazing transpires.

The sun shines. A bird sings a song of a Spring to be. A lone honey bee is quickly spotted darting past a lone flowering weed. A tree frog is heard humming in a thawing glen.

Change is in the air.

Suddenly the clouds part as we find ourselves glancing heavenward wondering what is the now odd color staring down at us from the typical grey sky.
It is blue.
The beautifully bright crisp clear blue of all that is fresh and new.

Take courage, you weary cold sojourners of this endless drudge known as Winter. . .for over the next several weeks, as this seemingly longer than usual Winter begins to thankfully wane, be encouraged by looking upward, resting in the knowledge that behind the endless grey cold clouds lies a beautiful deep blue sky ready to offer hope to a frozen world in search of a warming thaw.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord– plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV).