​Spring is my favorite time of year.   Having arrived in London during the darkest, coldest time of the year, I can’t wait to experience England in the springtime.   I can sense it right around the corner, but so far, it seems like it just won’t come.  Increasingly over the last few weeks, I’ve started noticing little green shoots poking through the mulch, buds are forming on the trees, a few are just barely starting to flower, and the daffodils are starting to bloom in the park!  But just when I was getting excited, it snowed this weekend!  
 
Perhaps because we’re so much more exposed to the elements here as we walk everywhere, or because I have to go outside to the shed to put clothes in the dryer (I’m not complaining- it’s still better than crunchy clothes that dry on the line), or maybe because I just don’t like being cold, I am very attuned to these little signs that the season is changing. I am more eager than I ever remember for Spring to come and stay. 
 
More than any other year, I am struck by how the season of Lent, in anticipation of Easter (which falls on April 1 this year), overlaps with and echoes nature’s cycle of new life coming after a time of darkness and hard ground.  On Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, the liturgy reminds us that we come from dust and invites us into a time of letting go and going without.  There is suffering, a loss of the status quo, and a facing of the unknown in the stories of the disciples and Jesus leading up to Easter.  And then, there is this bursting forth of glory and hope come Easter morning with our celebration of Jesus’ resurrection and promise of a new life through faith in Him.

As we approach the halfway mark of our semester abroad, I am fighting off the sadness that comes when something so long anticipated comes to a close.  I want to remain right here in the thick of it as long as I can! But cup half full-- I will enjoy this moment, in a little cafe down the street from Westminster Abbey, where I just popped in for a midday service, across a table from my favorite person in the world, sipping tea, watching the snow flurries.  I am trying to soak it all up, impress it in my mind so it can be another happy place I can go to in my thoughts when I'm somewhere less dreamy.  Humor me as I tell you about the classic red telephone box across the street , the double-decker buses rolling by, which are so iconic but truly so useful, the architecture of the buildings in my view- columns, arches, scrolls, whimsical details that are so commonplace here one almost forgets to notice them.  It could be practically any corner in London, but it achieves infamy when I sit in it for a while.