Always winter ... but always Christmas and always Easter

Image credit: By Jrmichae [CC BY-SA 4.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],
from Wikimedia Commons

by David Sellnow

Where I live, it seems like winter will never end.  This week a record low temperature was set -- in single digits.  Waking up yesterday morning, the wind chill felt several degrees below zero.  Tomorrow a snowstorm is predicted.  And it's April.

There's a line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, that comes to mind:  "It is winter in Narnia," said Mr. Tumnus, "and has been for ever so long ... always winter, but never Christmas."  Life in the real world can seem very much like that so much of the time. Another way of describing life's long, cold, dreariness was expressed by Moses many centuries ago:  "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow" (Psalm 90:10).

Yet that message of sadness and pain is not the only word we have from God about our lives in this world.  In reality, while our lives may feel like an endless winter, it is always Christmas for us, and always Easter.  The meaning of Christmas was that God came into this world to share our pain, to take all our troubles onto himself.  It was prophesied (Isaiah 7:14), "The Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel" [which means, "God with us"].  Christ entered into our existence and "took up our pain and bore our suffering. ... The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:4,5). Christ faced all the worst that this world has to offer and died for us.  But "it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him" (Acts 2:24).  Every Easter, we celebrate his resurrection from the grave and the life eternal we have through him.  And resurrection hope is not just something that prompts us to put on springtime clothing and go to church on Easter Sunday.  God's mercy "has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3) -- a hope that enables us to get up and face each day in the here and now, as well as having assurance of being with God in the hereafter.

Salvator Mundi by da Vinci
Wikimedia Commons

It may indeed always be winter in the way our lives feel on this earth.  But in Christ, it is always Christmas, for he is beside us as our Brother, born into humanity with us.  And in Christ, it is always Easter, filled with hope and new life.  Because he lives, we also will live (John 14:19).