Spring is Springing Forth!

Lately, I have been inspired by the season of spring. Plants, trees, and grass that were dead (okay, dormant) a month ago are now bursting forth with life. Life is all over the place right now and it is beautiful. I think God gives us spring to remind us of resurrection life....life that only comes from Him. If you care to visit this blog from time to time, you will see many quotes from my dear brother, George MacDonald. The majority of these quotes will come from a book called Discovering the Character of God which is a compilation of MacDonald's prose and poetry pieced together by Michael Phillips. This book is one of my very few prized possessions. Take this in:

"There exists a mystery in the world, and in all the looks of it--a mystery because of a meaning. There is a jubilance in every sunset. There is a whispering of strange secrets in the wind of the twilight and an unknown bliss in the song of the lark. We cannot help but be aware of a something beyond it all, now and then filling our minds and hearts with wonder, and compelling us to ask, "What can it all mean?"

The flowers live.

They come from the same heart as man himself, and are sent to be his companions and ministers. There is something divinely magical because profoundly human, in them. Our feeling for many of them doubtless comes from certain associations from childhood. But how did they get hold of us even in childhood? Why do they enter our souls at all? It is because the flowers are joyous, inarticulate children, come with vague messages from the Father of all. If I confess that what they say to me sometimes makes me weep, how can I call my feeling for them anything but love?

And the flowers are only one example. All nature, from the mountains to the sea to the fog that hangs so low on the hills, the heather in August, the hot, the cold, the rain--everything speaks, like the flower, messsages from God, the Father of the universe. The eternal may have a thousand forms of which we know nothing yet!

The beautiful things around us are the expressions of God's face, or, as in Faust, the garment whereby we see the deity. Is God's sun more beautiful than God himself? Has he not left it to us as a symbol of his own life-giving light?"