Don’t Believe Winter

There are days in St. Louis when spring seems less like a season and more like a rumor. Especially in February.

The sky turns gray. The trees are bare. Snow gets pushed to the edges of the street where it changes from white to a color found nowhere in nature. Everything that was alive six months earlier appears to have reconsidered.

Those were some of my favorite days to walk to the Missouri Botanical Garden, which was right across the street from our house.

Because I knew a secret.

Spring was hiding inside a giant glass dome.

It’s called the Climatron.

The Climatron is a geodesic dome containing a tropical rainforest in the middle of St. Louis. Outside it can be ten degrees with snow on the ground. But inside, it’s the tropics.

So on some cold winter days when I was working on a sermon, I would bundle up, grab my Bible and my notes, and walk there.

I loved the journey almost as much as the destination.

Cold first. To really enjoy the destination, I had to be cold down to my bones. I would crunch through snow with my hands in my pockets and my shoulders pulled up around my ears. The wind would hit my face. Bare branches everywhere.

Nothing blooming. Nothing green. Nothing suggesting that winter was ever going to end.

Then I would open the door.

Whoosh! Warm air! Wet earth! Water running! Green everywhere!

My glasses would fog. I’d unzip my coat.

And there, while the rest of St. Louis was frozen, orchids were blooming. And so would my heart again. Especially during seasons when the winter wasn’t merely outside, and I bet you know what I mean.

There are winters of the soul too.

Times when something we’ve counted on disappears. When God seems quiet. When the future that once felt obvious suddenly doesn’t. When hope isn’t gone exactly, but you have to work harder than usual to find it.

The dangerous thing about winter is that it can convince you that what you see is all there is.

Bare branches. Frozen ground. Gray sky. End of story.

But the Climatron knew better. Just a few inches of glass separated two completely different worlds. On one side, everything looked dead. On the other, life was exploding everywhere.

Both were real. The winter was real. The cold was real. The bare trees were real.

Faith didn’t require pretending otherwise.

But they weren’t the whole truth, because there was something else happening that I couldn’t see from where I had been standing.

I went to the Climatron many times over those St. Louis years as a pastor. I supposed I was going there to write sermons. But now I know I went there because my heart needed to walk through that door again.

I needed warm air to hit my frozen face. I needed to smell dirt. I needed to see something blooming. I needed to remember:

Don’t believe everything winter tells you.

Spring may be closer than you think.