I’m not proud of this thing I’m about to admit.  Yet this thing remains so persistent every year that I can no longer deny it. I’m an optimist, sometimes to a fault. But this thing I’m about to confess… it’s a bit bleak. 

            (Insert a great, anxious breath here.)

            I don’t love the spring.

            Actually, I think spring is the worst.

            The spring smells like acres of thawing dog shit. When you walk through the park, the squishy ground is one continuous shade of brown; the mud, the thawed shit, the trashy old snow, and the dissolving actual trash; you can’t tell what you’re walking in until you’re home and it’s too late.

            Spring is a tease. Just when you think the daylilies breaking through the soil are safe from snow, a blizzard hits. And when it does, you have to dig out the snow shovels from the back corner of the garage, where you happily stashed them the day before.

            Spring is the worst because it exposes us. Its sudden warm winds inspire us to shed our layers, revealing all the winter insulation we worked so hard to collect under our skin.

           And, it reveals our messes. When the snow finally melts, my yard is revealed with its chaos of plant pots, sandbox toys, and patio furniture I meant to pick up last fall before the snow, but didn’t. And though we did rake back in October, you’d never be able to tell since the oaks insist on holding their leaves until after Christmas. So we will get to rake again, which is just the best news since the leaves are slimy, the yard is 100% mud, and the aroma of dog shit is all I notice.

            The spring is a damn mess.

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            And if believing that spring is the worst season isn’t bad enough, I also lately have a Jesus Problem. I’m not working with a congregation this Holy Week, so I have time to explore this Jesus Problem. Working Lutheran pastors don’t have this luxury; they’re furiously writing sermons for Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, buried under open books, worship bulletins, theological podcasts, cold coffee cups, and overflowing emails from volunteers who will set up the sanctuary’s lilies (and a million other things).

            My Jesus Problem started with a bunch of familiar doubts. Who really was Jesus and did he have any real clue about what he was up to? And, seriously, he was dead. Did he really come back to life? Some people have unwavering belief. Mine wavers.

           At the center of my faith is a steady, loving God who is an amazing artist and made all that I can see. And it IS so good. Then, when I stand in my melting, muddy, dirty springtime yard, I breathe in the wind (carefully, because of the dog poop thing). And that wind, to me, is God’s Spirit, connecting me to everything else.

            My breath is connected to the elm tree buds about to bloom, which are connected to the birds building nests among the blooms, and those nests are connected to last summer’s twigs which grew thanks to past sunshine, and the sunshine connects us to millions of swirling galaxies. And, since all of our atoms came from those swirling, exploding stars… that simply means that the twigs, nests, eggs, birds, blooms, mud, and all of us are made out of stardust. And that shit is holy to me.

           It’s so holy to me, in fact, that Jesus sits in the back seat. This is my actual problem. Theologians and bishops and church history in my tradition insist on Jesus being the center- NOT in the back seat- particularly if you’re the one writing sermons. This is my springtime, Holy Week, theological mess.

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           Another mess, this one of the personal sort: In December, my six year old got strep throat. We were on vacation, so we got to check out Hawaii’s urgent care system. Antibiotics helped her enjoy the beaches, but once we were home again the strep came back and we watched her spirit crumble. For three months she struggled to eat, to sleep, and to function as the happy kid she has always been. She wept every morning we left her at school and some days she wept for most of the time she was at school. Being home didn’t make her much happier. Her stomach constantly bothered her. Our calendar became a long list of appointments with specialists and therapists. Her clothes stopped fitting because she lost so much weight.

           Worrying about her health this winter has been the most draining, terrible thing I’ve yet experienced. We had questions that doctors didn’t have answers for. The parenting books I own don’t have chapters on sudden, severe childhood anxiety. Her school’s counselor was gone on medical leave and so her teacher called me asking for advice that I didn’t have. I could only ask our pediatrician questions via a game of phone tag through multiple nurses and messaging systems.

            I had no idea how to help my kid feel better, which crushed me because I had literally stopped collecting paychecks and traded in my office at church to be present for my kids at home, hopefully making their days better, yet I was epically failing her.

            Her tonsils came out in mid-March and she is completely back to her pre-strep self.  We are lucky that the root of her problem was identifiable and that those rotten tonsils could simply be removed. I know parents who would gladly pay thousands and thousands of dollars to be so lucky.

            She started feeling better by the end of March, right as most of the winter’s snow was melting away. I, on the other hand, have taken a little longer to recover.  

Her rotten tonsils exhausted me to the core. I did all the things you’re supposed to do these days to take care of yourself; meditation, yoga, chocolate-eating, impulse shopping at Target, spending time with girlfriends. I regret none of those things because they kept me functioning. But nothing cured me like a hike in the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden.

           It was a Tuesday morning, both kids were at school, and there was a blizzard coming the next day. For a few short hours the sun was out and it was warm. So, I left the laundry, my computer, and half-full breakfast dishes crusting on the table and hiked out into the messy spring woods.

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          Here’s the thing I love about Easter that no one much notices: Easter is a damn mess. Easter takes place in a graveyard, after an execution. The main characters are women who have been oppressed all their lives. Their friends are in hiding. Together they’re grieving. There is blood and tears and oil and stink and dirt and a stone that stands between them and the body of their friend. The sun has risen, but they don’t notice. They’re exhausted. Eventually, when the women tell their male friends that they’ve seen Jesus alive, the men almost literally say, “Bullshit.” Easter is a damn mess.

            My daughter thinks Easter means a new sparkly purple dress. My son thinks rabbits lay eggs, because -you know- the Easter bunny.  This year, I’m not so sure my brain can accept that Jesus’s body came back to life. Dead things stay dead. Maybe next year it’ll feel different. But, we’ll still go to our church on Sunday to sing with our neighbors.  Everything might be a bit muddy and messy, but I need Easter and all of the things that it might mean.

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           There were just seven of us at the Wildflower Garden the morning before the blizzard. Old, hard snow hid in the shadows. Wild turkeys walked everywhere. Tiny green shoots of a million kinds were peeking through the ground of last fall’s dead leaves. When I incorrectly identified a redheaded woodpecker, a kind woman showed me her favorite birding app. It was too wintery for mosquitos and too soon for poison ivy. It was all quite good. I had even brought a mug of coffee to wake up my exhausted soul.

           I knew that there was one wildflower in bloom. The first flower of the year: snow trillium. Since the kids were not there I walked ridiculously slowly, searching the ground for this thing I’d never seen. I only just saw brown, dead leaves and dark, silent trees. Some of the aspen were showing their fuzzy caterpillar blooms. The trout lily leaves were bravely standing above the brown.  But no snow trillium. I missed them the first time around the garden.

            So I hiked around the garden a second time. Slower. I heard a hawk. And frogs. I saw gold finches and yellow warblers. I saw the place where lady slippers and nodding trillium will bloom some warmer day. I talked to a woman I knew (who didn’t recognize me) about how rude turkeys can be. Still, I saw only dead leaves.         

           On my third time around I saw a man bent down, very close to the ground, taking a picture of something I could not see. Trying to not disturb him, I walked up next to him keeping my shadow out of his shot. He looked up, expectantly. There were the snow trillium; tiny white blossoms close to the ground, trembling in the breeze and glowing in the sunlight.  

“I’ve been looking for these,” I said.

           “Yes,” he answered, with the accent of a faraway African nation. “We have all come for these today.”

           He took more pictures and asked if I’d noticed any birds. I told him where he could find the turkeys and he took off toward them.

           I stood in that garden with those flowers for a few more minutes, with an ocean of tears behind my eyes and some long-ago, familiar feeling growing up my throat. (Later I discovered it was joy.) The trillium still trembled and glowed, brave and vulnerable, and they were growing from a damn mess of dead stuff.  This is Easter enough for me.

            (Alleluia.)