When Winter Finally Breaks

For a hundred years in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the land of Narnia endured an enchanted winter — always cold, always frozen, and as the inhabitants whispered to one another, "always winter and never Christmas." The White Witch had seen to that. Hope had been buried so long beneath the snow that most Narnians had stopped expecting anything different.

But then something shifted. Father Christmas appeared on the road for the first time in a century. Streams began to trickle. Snow slid from branches. Flowers pushed through the frost. The children noticed it before they could name it — the air itself felt different. And the reason was simple, though none of them fully understood it yet: Aslan was on the move.

Lewis understood what every pastor knows — that hope rarely arrives as a thunderclap. It comes first as a thaw. A subtle warming you almost miss. A quiet stirring beneath what looked permanently frozen.

Some of you are living in a long winter right now. Grief has settled in. The diagnosis hasn't changed. The phone hasn't rung. And you've quietly stopped expecting spring.

But the God who spoke the world into being is not idle. Jehovah is always on the move, even when the ground still looks frozen. The Prophet Isaiah declared, "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19).

Spring doesn't ask your permission. It just comes.