When Your Heart Needs a Personal Resurrection of Spring

robin in spring snow

Spring always comes.

Staring out across the forest near our cabin where a major tree-thinning project was being done by the Forest Service in northern Arizona, I had to remind myself of that truth. Sliced-through lengths of pine trees littered the ground. Discarded boughs and pinecones mingled with the mud puddles on our gravel driveway.

In hopes of reducing the risk of a future wildfire and to improve the health of remaining trees, the project began this winter during the off-season. I worried what it would mean to the wildlife in the area at the felling of so many trees.

Spring always comes, I thought. Would it be true in this case? As I stared at the ground covered with stumps and broken branches, I reminded my heart, Creation is designed for life.For renewal.

For resurrection.

Even with that inner pep talk, I went to bed discouraged. Surely the small woodland animals and birds had fled to someplace safer, if they had survived at all.

During the night, under the light of a half moon, we heard the bugle of the elk across the lakebed. Two coyotes greeted the dawn with a call-and-response yip-and-yowl in the blue-gray morning light.

Not to be outdone, a flock of stellar jays descended on the back deck demanding with a united shook shook shook that the empty feeder be filled with birdseed. Soon we spotted juncos, acorn woodpeckers, and the head-first-down-the-trees nuthatches. Our grandkids’ favorite character, the neighborhood red squirrel, chattered from the boughs of the still-standing ponderosas, encouraging the tassel-eared Abert's squirrel to wake from his winter's nap to see what all the commotion was about. 

With war happening in Ukraine and the displacement of more than ten million Ukrainian people, it seemed petty to be concerned about a small corner of the Coconino Forest and the tiny creatures that lived there. But maybe the ordinariness of our lives is something that draws us—teachers, doctors, plumbers, parents, children, and engineers—to make a difference for kindness and goodness in our own spheres of influence, to be place makers and not place un-makers, as so aptly put by writer Christie Purifoy.

In a weekly email to my inbox, Purifoy wrote, “War ‘un-makes’ places in devastating ways. I don't know what to do other than pray, but I take hope knowing that my place is connected to every other place in the world. When we pray and when we cultivate goodness and beauty in our places, we resist the ‘un-making’ of violence and death. With God's help, every seed we plant grows a tree of life.”

Later that day, as we packed up the truck to head back to Chandler, I caught a glimpse of orange in the branches of a cedar. The bird flew off before I could snap a photo. My heart leapt. 

The first robin of the season.

Spring. Always. Comes.

May the discouraged places of your heart believe again in resurrection.

This post originally appeared in the SanTan Sun News.