When the Snow Finally Melts

In C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the land of Narnia suffers under a curse. The White Witch has made it "always winter and never Christmas" — a world locked in permanent cold, where nothing grows and nothing changes. The Narnians have endured this frozen darkness for a hundred years.

But then Aslan begins to move.

Before anyone sees the great Lion, the snow starts to melt. Streams begin to trickle. Father Christmas arrives for the first time in a century. The children notice crocuses pushing through the slush, birds singing in bare branches, and patches of green spreading across the hillsides. Spring is coming — not because the winter decided to end, but because someone greater than winter is on His way.

Lewis understood something that every believer clings to in the hardest seasons of life: hope does not begin when deliverance arrives. Hope begins when we notice the thaw.

Some of you are living in a long winter right now. The diagnosis hasn't changed. The marriage still feels cold. The grief hasn't lifted. But the God who spoke light into darkness is moving, even now. The Prophet Isaiah promised, "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19).

Hope is not pretending winter doesn't exist. Hope is noticing the first drops of water falling from the icicles and knowing that the Almighty has set spring in motion — and nothing in this world can freeze it back again.