The Long-Expected Spring

In C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Narnia has been locked under the White Witch's spell for a hundred years. It is "always winter and never Christmas" — a world frozen in perpetual cold, where every tree stands bare and every stream lies silent under ice. The Narnians have almost forgotten what warmth feels like.

But then Aslan is on the move. And the first sign isn't a battle or a dramatic rescue. It's a thaw. The children notice water dripping from branches. Snow slides off the pine boughs. Somewhere in the distance, a bird begins to sing. Spring doesn't arrive all at once — it seeps in gradually, quietly, unstoppably. The Witch rages against it, but she cannot refreeze what the Lion has begun to melt.

There are seasons in life when it feels like always winter. The diagnosis lingers. The grief won't lift. The marriage stays cold. And we start to wonder if spring will ever come again.

But the God who spoke light into darkness is also the God who sends thaw into frozen places. The prophet Isaiah declared, "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" Sometimes hope doesn't arrive with trumpets. It arrives the way spring came to Narnia — a slow drip, a single birdsong, a barely perceptible warmth on your face. Don't mistake the gradual for the absent. The Almighty is on the move, and what He begins to thaw, nothing in this world can refreeze.