It’s strange.  Kentucky weather, that is.  Last week, about this time, we were being hammered with snowflakes.  We ended up with eight to fifteen inches of snow; a blizzard, we called it (yes, I realize this is outrageous for those of you not from around here.).  Today, a mere seven days later, the sun’s reflecting from my laptop screen, there’s water left on the grounds from the rains we had today and one will feel a slight cool breeze outside.  The picture of spring, it is.

Except.

There’s still a pile of snow right beside the end of my very short driveway.  I noticed it when I left this morning and it was only a little smaller when I arrived home this evening.  It seems mundane: a pile of snow no deeper than the height of a soda can.  This miniheap of snow came from the people employed by my homeowner’s association.  Last Saturday, after all the snow had landed and all of my plans for the weekend had been shattered, they came by to scrape the roads.  Then, they pulled out the snow blade, drove up on my very wide driveway which is joined to that of my neighbor’s, dropped the blade, pulled back, lifted the blade, and pushed it all to the driver’s side of my driveway.  There was so much snow, they didn’t even realize what they took with it: the bush planted in the little mulched space between my garage door and my neighbor’s.  No one even knew it was in the pile until this morning, when it’s whimpy, sad, uprooted little branches finally appeared from under the melting pile of snow.  Such a sad end to a bush.  I wasn’t very attached to it; sadly, I didn’t even recognize that there was a bush in the mulched space until the snow melted and I saw the disturbed earth left in its wake.

Now I wonder what shall happen to this bush.  Will some stranger decide it’d look good amongst their own foliage?  Will the HOA workers return to reinstate the bush to its rightful site?  Will it sit by my driveway until I decide to scoot it over with my garbage one Friday morning? 

The bush reminds me of how our lives can feel, sometimes.  Uprooted.  Frozen.  Desperate for warm, nourishing, safe environments.  I’ve been there.  You’ve been there.  We’ve all been there.  Uprooted and without a clue of where we should be.  “What did I do to deserve this?” we might ask.  “Why do I have to go through this cold, harsh, exposed, vulnerable, sad time?”  Even if we haven’t articulated these questions, our hearts have screamed them at one time or another.  It is when we’re in a place like this lowly bush that we feel powerless concerning the future of our existence.  “Will I have to go somewhere new–somewhere outside of my comfort zone?”  “Will I get to go back to the way things were?”  “Will I just be stuck here until I die?”

Thankfully, we can always count on Someone to bail us out.  While we may have to rot a little bit in our frozen slush, He will always fix everything.  He knows exactly what we need–exactly how to solve our problems.  Sometimes, that means replanting where we were, bringing with us this new outlook on life.  Other times, it’s ’bout time to move on, takeing what we’ve learned with us, and applying it to new ventures of our lives.  Regardless, there are always going to be times when we feel uprooted, unsure, and even confused.