Winter moves both slower and faster than imagined. Much like all things in life. I've been stuck on the idea of home for so long there's been a blizzard and daffodils since my last post. What is home and when is it sweet?

Maybe I got hung up over learning my great grandfather spent a winter of his youth just miles from my new home. His family left Wisconsin for California in the fall of 1886. They wintered over in a settlement called Sweet Home outside of Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous United States. The winter of 1886 was, by all accounts, horrendous. There are stories online of one of the severest blizzards in Kansas history that winter with losses of cattle and losses of life. My great grandfather's parents and family turned around and returned to Wisconsin with the spring thaw.

Here I am some 130 years later content and revived right where there's family history of fleeing. It hung me up on the idea of place as home rather than the true landscape of home, which I'm discovering is letting go and trusting my life to Jesus.

130 years later I lived my first Kansas blizzard and it was gorgeous. Not that it was one of the greatest blizzards on record. Plus I appreciate a lot more creature comforts. There's so much technology today that helps make winter more endurable and pleasant.

Shoveling the driveway struck me as a simple metaphor for who Jesus is in my life and what my role is in cultivating that relationship. I was shoveling the driveway when the snow plow went by and it is an illustration of what a relationship with Jesus is when it's working and at its best. I spent a lot of my life without that relationship being central, and not being fulfilled. Many years with a silent longing.

A good relationship with Jesus takes showing up. It takes maintenance. It takes doing something. Not that grace is earned. Never earned. It is a gift that must be sought and accepted. I shoveled the driveway. The snow plow cleared the street. Together is a working way forward to successfully get somewhere. To go where needed.

The plow meets me after I act. Then the way is cleared by that simple act of faith that Jesus will be there for me when I go to him. He's the snow plow in life's blizzards when we seek him.

All that's left of the Sweet Home settlement is a cemetery on Highway 36 near Lebanon. There's no town or main street. Only a cemetery.

But Sweet Home isn't a place on a map. We know with certainty we will die. Serving Jesus is life now and the afterlife. So Sweet Home is really just getting to Jesus. The state you live in, its climate, doesn't matter. All that matters is getting to Jesus. Step out the front door and he will be there for you. If it takes a plow, he will be there to meet you.

Blizzards and daffodils and acts of faith. A daffodil bulb doesn't look like much. It takes an act of faith to dig a plug of a hole for a blobby flower bulb and to believe it will grow over the cold winter and rise in spring and blossom. A cousin teased me for being excited when a daffodil first popped up out of the soil. Her California daffodils were already bloomed out and faded. But I enjoy the poetry of daffodils thriving from the snow melt. This is the same soil that won Willa Cather a Pulitzer. This soil is rich and heavy and stuck to the bulb planter until my brother solved our planting problem by spraying cooking oil on the bulb planter in between the 400 holes we dug for the bulbs he ordered.

Acts of faith. Stepping out, seeking, meeting, planting, cultivating. Bulbs planted on faith rose shiny and a happy yellow this spring. Sun and winter wheat and migrating geese.

Blizzards and challenges, stuckness and grace. So what is home and when is it sweet?

I'm learning the answer to all is one and the same. When it's Jesus.

Bonus spring footage:

P.S. Thank you to the kind folks sending messages that you missed the blog. You were the wind behind my back and I am grateful.