Day 36: Is it really still snowing?

My kids are leaving tomorrow to go for a week long visit to Grandma's house in Michigan. My facebook feed was filled with lament from over a mid-April midwestern snow. I remember growing up, late snows feeling like the end of the world. Why can't winter be finished? Why can't we just enjoy the warmth and beauty of spring and the hope of summer?

I've never spent Easter without the kids. It feels a little strange to not be with them, but as my mother reminded me, this is not a typical Easter. Our plans are tentative. Maybe we'll have a baby in the quietness of the empty house, or maybe, just maybe, Ulrich and I will sneak away for the weekend and enjoy a few still days without work or kids to be renewed. As I ponder these plans, even though it is just a few short days away both options feel impossibly far from where I am.

Right now, my house is a disaster as we are still trying to clean and re-arrange closets to make room for baby stuff. Contractions wake me up at night and I sit up in the darkness listening to my body and trying to decide if it's time or am I still just doing warm up exercises. Work is in a strange lull waiting on new parts to arrive from the manufacturers and we are all pounding silently away on our computers on important, but not urgent projects. Hoping to be caught up and ready when the next big push arrives.

It is still decidedly Lent, but the smell of Easter is faint in front of us.

In my small world, I feel myself and my life being transformed into something yet unknown to me. The process of transformation still painfully ahead. The ongoing cleaning of my house, the piles of work that continue to line my desk, and the labor and birth of this new little life. For others the dread of winter damping the hope of spring. But somewhere, at the top of the hill new life awaits us all. The beautiful transformation that echos throughout the chapter of John. In this Holy Week may we bow our heads and open our hearts.