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    Joe and the Volcano — a movie I loved but everyone else seemed to dislike — begins with the colorless march of workers into their factory. Everything is black. The shoes are black. The mud is black. The asphalt is black. The cars are black. The mood is black. But in the middle of this colorless and hopeless world, one flower is growing through a crack in the asphalt. The workers march in, over, and around the flower. Against all odds it clings tenaciously to its incongruent place in a colorless world. Just as you begin thinking it will survive the monotonous onslaught of the colorless hordes, someone steps on it and crushes the life out of the only color in this otherwise drab and hopeless world.

    Life feels that way sometimes. Nothing is happening in the job market. The news is the same as it was yesterday; not even the key names were changed. The hopes of finding someone to love you are as futile today as yesterday. The grades at school are not changing despite your increased study. You somehow managed to gain half a pound on your new hot diet last week. The pregnancy test came back negative, again. You feel dirty from falling to the same old temptation, again. Any ray of hope you had for things to be better last week have been brought crashing down to earth. Nope, not a ray of light on your horizon, just a shooting star that was here for a moment, then extinguished in the black night of despair.

    Winter is much that way. The color of autumn fades into the lifeless cold of winter. The invigorating crispness in the air turns to biting cold. The beautiful wet flakes of that first big snowfall degrade into piles of dirty ice on the roadsides and brown slush on the sidewalk by the end of the season.

    But Spring is the time of seeds. It is the time when bold and beautiful life bursts forth from small, tiny, bits of hard black bits of promise.

We are a resurrection people!

    We are a resurrection people! We are a community of faith, hope, and love built on the empty tomb, the promised return of our Savior, and his abiding presence with us through the Holy Spirit. We identify with Spring. We are a seed time people who know life bursts forth bold and beautiful from what once seemed to be the colorless bits of broken dreams.

    That first band of disciples knew the resurrected Lord so they held tenaciously to their hope till Pentecost burst forth in all its glory. Jesus had told them about a seed falling in the ground and dying. They were waiting for the flower to sprout, grow, and bloom. They knew they were a seed time people.

    When Jesus had left them on the mountain as he ascended, he had reminded them of his dream of a color-filled people. He wasn’t satisfied with one race, one color, or one culture. He wanted color! He had planted a seed time people who would blossom with the color of the rainbow.

    Even when they would face that colorless abyss of death, they were could be confident that beauty and color lay ahead. While the seed they planted wasn’t such a marvelous thing to behold, it held in its life the promise of a far greater beauty. Jesus had made them a seedtime people.

    So as Spring blooms around us, and the small seeds planted earlier begin their miracle of blossom, let’s remember that we are a seed time people: the best is not yet, the seed has just begun.