When the Snow Began to Melt

In C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch has cast Narnia into a hundred years of frozen despair — "always winter and never Christmas," as Mr. Tumnus puts it. The trees are bare. The rivers are locked in ice. The creatures of Narnia have nearly forgotten what sunshine feels like.

Then word begins to spread: "Aslan is on the move."

No one has seen him yet. No army has marched. No battle has been fought. But at the mere rumor of his coming, the snow begins to melt. Streams start to trickle. Flowers push through frozen ground. Father Christmas appears for the first time in a century, and the Witch's sleigh drags through mud where it once glided over ice.

Lewis understood something profound about the nature of hope. Hope doesn't wait for the full victory to begin its work. It starts thawing things the moment it arrives.

This is what the prophet Isaiah meant when he declared, "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light" (Isaiah 9:2). The light doesn't wait until every shadow is banished. It breaks in — and the darkness begins retreating.

Some of you are living in a long winter right now. But hear this: the King is on the move. And where He moves, things that have been frozen for years begin, quietly, to thaw.