It’s Spring! That means warm, sunny days. Fat, green buds on my mulberry tree are getting plumper. Filling out and slowly uncurling to reveal their bright green leaves. Dark green spinach leaves in my vegetable patch unfurl, getting ready for picking and eating.

In the little house around the corner, our much-anticipated grandchild is welcomed into the world by his excited parents and family. There’s new life everywhere as we look around with glad eyes.

But there’s no rest, despite it being such a bright, expectant season. Always it’s war!

In the vegetable patch there are spritely white cabbage moths darting about to lay their eggs to become fat green caterpillars turning the spinach and tomato leaves into ragged limp leaves. White spots of scale are being spread by the ants on the mulberry and laurel trees to weaken those trees.

Our little grandson is distressed by colic and wind pains. Squirming and murmuring and crying with pain.

In this Life, there’s never any final arrival. No end destination. I will never completely get my act together. I will always be learning. Trying things out. Hitting another bump in the road. Coming to another bend in the path with no idea of what’s around the corner. Muddling along. Often getting it completely wrong.

We never get to sit down with folded hands and completely fulfilled dreams and hopes.  We may have short seasons of rest and standing still. Seasons of excitement and prosperity. Seasons of seeing some dreams fulfilled.

But there are many seasons of pain, grief and loss.  Even seasons of terror sometimes. Sometimes these seasons all run together like the muddled waters of a water colour. Always, somewhere, whether on the edge or in the centre, there is war. Troubles. Difficulties.

In the Lord of the Rings, the travellers returned to the Shire after their adventures when it seemed that “All things now went well, with hope always of becoming still better; and Sam was as busy and as full of delight as even a hobbit could wish. (But there soon) appeared a shadow of old troubles.”

I can appreciate Henry Cloud’s thought, “Become a friend of process.. embrace it.. live in it.  The answers and end points are along the way, not in the beginning.”