Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. – Romans 5:1-5 (CEB)
I returned from my trip to Australia early last week. There is much to share from the trip, but for the moment I want to focus on the return. It is summer in Australia, with many of our days there having temperatures around 100 degrees. Even more, the sun was incredibly strong, so that I was constantly strategizing for how to stay in the shade as much as possible in whatever we were doing. We got back in the middle of the night, into wintry Philadelphia. Within 24 hours snow was falling heavily. To go from vast cloudless summertime skies to cold and snowy was more than shocking to the system. It made the whole world feel particularly grey and hopeless. Everything felt confined and lifeless.
Yet on Wednesday, with the snow blanketing the ground and everything feeling claustrophobically hemmed in, I received a blast of hope. I received a box of 2025 Topps Series 1 baseball cards that I had preordered months before. While it was cold and snowy here on Wednesday, it was also the day that pitchers and catchers reported to spring training. The opening of spring training is a day that symbolizes for many the hope that comes each year. In the midst of lifeless winter, the promise of a new year bursts through. The hope of each baseball team that this year will be a year of joy resonates among baseball fans (especially if your team looks to be competitive this year, but in the spring even the rebuilding teams can have hope!). The new baseball cards for this year are always released on the day that pitchers and catchers report, making it a tangible sign of hope in the future since Florida and Arizona are so far away from here. Being able to touch the cards gives a sensory experience of the hope in what is to come. Most years I could tell you all of these things in theory, but the experience is not particularly strong. This year, though, in the midst of returning to the struggles of winter, those cards blared out a message of hope and joy on a day that it was very much needed.
Of course we can count on the cycles of winter moving into spring and then into summer happening every year. We can count on the routines of the baseball season. It is much harder to have hope in new life in midst of winter storms that we encounter in life that seem to only bring destruction and make everything fall apart. There is no clear sense that summer will come or things will get better. Yet in Christ we have a promise that even when all appears to be dead and hopeless, God is still present. More than that, God is at work bringing new life. This is the hope of the gospel that we cling to in the midst of the winter days of life. New life is always already on the way even before we realize how desperately we need it. Praise be to the God who promises new life and brings us hope!