In my garden, the daffodils have been sleeping in the cold, dark earth for months.
No proof of spring. No visible progress. Just silence, pressure, and frozen ground.
Then one day, without fanfare, they push straight up through the snow.
I’ve been thinking about that in light of something Jesus says in Love Without End by Glenda Green—that our human structures (economic, political, educational, social) have grown so big, so tangled and corrupt, that they can’t really be “fixed.” They will simply fall, because there is no integrity left to hold them up.
That can sound frightening, until we remember the daffodils.
Winter “falls,” too.
Not because it’s punished, but because it has completed its season.
Because another life is already pressing upward from below.
Maybe that’s where we are now.
So many of the systems we’ve leaned on feel brittle and exhausted.
We can sense it: the strain in our institutions, the widening cracks in “business as usual.” We’re watching the old ice thin beneath our feet.
But below that, in the unseen soil, love has been weathering.
Weathering our disappointments.
Weathering our failures at loving one another well.
Weathering the grief of a planet that has forgotten its own light.
Love weathers by going deeper.
It sends its roots down through rock and rubble, through all the broken promises and collapsed structures, until it finds the Living Water, nothing can corrupt.
When the old forms finally give way—as they must—what rises through the cracks will be whatever we have rooted ourselves in.
If we root in fear, we’ll grow more fear.
If we root in blame, we’ll grow more division.
But if we root in love, even now, quietly, daily, we will become like those daffodils:
Born of darkness.
Carrying light.
Fragile, and somehow stronger than the ice.
We don’t have to save the systems.
We’re here to embody a different order altogether.
We are the daffodils rising from a darkened planet,
called to bring a brighter day—
not by fixing what cannot be mended,
but by blooming into what was always meant to be.
