Letting the Light in
Spring does not arrive cleanly or all at once. It comes slowly and unevenly. The sounds of returning birds herald warmer weather, green shoots appear before the cold has fully released its hold. Even as the days lengthen, winter often still lingers. Spring understands something that faith has always known: that renewal is rarely quick, and almost never comfortable.
For me, spring is forever bound to the weeks I spent sitting beside my mother as she was dying. It was a season of watching and waiting. In her final days, nights seemed to stretch without end. At around four in the morning, birds would begin to sing outside her hospital window. Their sound floated into the room as we kept watch, fragile and persistent. Slowly the sky would lighten. Family would arrive. Nurses would come in with their laughter, their friendship, their quiet competence. Little by little, the weight of the night would begin to lift, and the light broke in.
The morning my mother died, a dove cooed outside the window. It was an ordinary sound, easily overlooked, but it felt like a sign: God, by his Holy Spirit, had seen us, and God was present within it all. The following day, the weather broke into full spring sunshine. Within days, the trees burst into leaf, bright and astonishingly green. Amidst grief and deep tiredness, life was continuing to unfold, and beauty was to be found everywhere, and yet still, for many months, it was hard to worship, hard to pray and hard to hear God's voice.
The Biblical story never pretends that light appears without darkness first. As we read the Christmas story in the depths of the British winter, Luke is careful not to place God's arrival in ideal conditions, but in a world shaped by political pressure, anxiety, grief, and ordinary hardship. God’s work of revealing himself does not begin with triumph or glory, but with quiet presence in tumultuous circumstances.
Many of us recognise that pattern in our own lives. We wait for things to feel resolved before we allow ourselves to hope. We tell ourselves that joy can come later, once the worry has passed or the loss has softened. That we’ll return to church when the kids are older, or pray again when God isn’t so mad about our bad choices. But Luke offers a different picture. Light appears while things are imperfect and unfinished, and bringing all that mess into the light is what makes it easier to bear.
Spring often teaches the same lesson. It does not begin when the ground is warm, but when it is just beginning to thaw. The first signs of life are fragile and ( like the camelia in my garden) sometimes thwarted on a first attempt at breakthrough. We might spot a single bud on a bare branch or daffodils appearing in Tesco. These are not signs that winter is finished, but reminders that its days are numbered. Spring has broken into the harshness of winter despite the most unfavourable conditions.
This is not a dramatic kind of hope. It does not erase grief or hurry us toward resolution. Instead, it sits alongside what is unfinished. Luke shows us a God who enters the ordinary: long journeys, crowded spaces, tired bodies, uncertain futures. Light does not come to deny reality, but to dwell within it.
As spring reaches its fullness, it reminds us that light works patiently. Each day grows brighter and longer almost without us noticing. Growth happens slowly and quietly. Faith, too, is less about sudden certainty and more about learning to trust the small signs of presence along the way.
Luke’s Gospel invites us to pay attention to where light has already begun to show itself, and to embrace it wholeheartedly, no matter how unfavourable the conditions of life. Because, like the signs of spring in the dark of winter, God is here in the world and breaking into even the bleakest of circumstances. This hope is not sentimental optimism, but learning to recognise the presence of God with us, and gently making space again for him to meet us.
The Reverend Jane Plackett-Ferguson
Chaplain to the Bishop of Hereford