What a month! Winter returned with a fury, and although the decorations in the dollar store are trying to convince us that it’s spring, we are not quite there.

This is the time of the year where “Beauty in every season” is really tested. I’m actively looking for those lovely things amid the freeze-thaw cycle — the trickle of the melt, the hint of green peeking up through the iris patch, and the calls of the migrating bird-folk as they return to their seasonal home. The kids have a different list. Theirs includes perfect snowman snow, the feel of smashing through thin ice on puddles, and days you can actually jump on the trampoline in socks.

We can agree on one thing, though. More daylight in the evening!

This is the time of the year when I need a good dose of perseverance! Not the kind I just muster up myself, but the kind that comes from being grounded in the Word of God, filled with the Spirit and prepared for the things I’m facing with His love, peace and strength.

1 Peter 1:3-9 (NIV)

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 

In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.“

A prayer for us this week:

May the Lord increase our capacity for His overflowing love.

May we experience a deepening of His peace in the places that feel simply overwhelming.

May the glorious and inexpressible joy of the Lord be our strength!