The azaleas bloomed first. They were an early surprise. The warm winter must have tricked them into thinking it was March, and they exploded into early color almost overnight – then were just as quickly gone. Their internal sentry said “Bloom!” and the whole hedge obeyed in a fuchsia rush.

Then nothing blossomed for weeks. Nothing.

Grief makes grey of everything, and lately it has leached most of the color from my world. But last week – the same awful week that placed a final mark of punctuation on my sadness – the lone rose bush in my backyard sprung to Technicolor life. And it hasn’t stopped blooming yet.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing it was planted by one of the spinster sisters who once occupied both halves of the duplex where I live. It’s that old. (And bless them, so were they.) Last spring it yielded very few flowers – and most of those were spotted and misshapen. So in the fall I pruned it back. Way back. And then forgot.

Now it’s defied the shears, the mixed up weather and my own sadness and is effortlessly yielding cutting after cutting for vase upon vase – each flower a bright, pink exclamation mark to interrupt the grey. Something inside said “Bloom!” And so it has.

I marvel at the God who flips a switch each spring, and turns on color as abruptly as if I’d just stepped into Oz – at how sleeping things awake and offer beauty in good time. I see Him do it in my front yard, and in back – along the interstate and just down the block – and I want Him to do it in me.

I want to awaken to His call to bloom, and defy the grey of a heavy season. To burst with color and beauty and life – not in spite of everything, but in and through everything. To let go those secrets itching to shout themselves out, and free each loveliness that clamors for an opening – any opening. I want to burst with color against all odds, declare my Maker, and so declare it spring. I want someone to say, “She blooms.”

Songwriter Nichole Nordeman sings,

And everything that’s new has bravely surfaced
Teaching us to breathe
What was frozen through is newly purposed
Turning all things green
So it is with You
And how You make me new
With every season’s change
And so it will be
As You are re-creating me
Summer, autumn, winter, spring.

“I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like the lily, and he will take root like the cedars of Lebanon. His shoots will sprout, and his beauty will be like the olive tree, and his fragrance like the cedars of Lebanon.” (Hosea 14: 5-6)