A FRIEND wrote me in a Tennessee March:
"I'm not sure that I really believe in a life after death."
I looked out at the trees and hills; and then I replied:
"One might be tempted to doubt a future life in fall or
winter, but not in this season, when the miracle of
resurrection is taking place all around us."
But even last fall was a hopeful season,
not a despair. Last fall all nature was preparing, not for
death, but for rebirth. The sky was filled with feathered
migrants winging south before encroaching frost. But why?
The better to be prepared to return north this spring, well
fed, well dressed, vital in instinct and life force, for the
miracle of parenthood. Even the frail butterflies were moved
by the instinct of survival, and some of us witnessed that
marvel, the migration of the Monarchs. Countless other
insects sought shelters in the ground or under multiplied
means of covering—in or on or under every crevice, twig, or
scrap of loose bark of a tree; in corners of human
habitations; in houses they constructed themselves of paper
or mud. The larger forms of life entered the mysterious, dim
world of hibernation, more similar to death than ordinary
sleep, from which every mother creature will emerge this
spring accompanied by her little ones—the multiplication of
life as well as its survival.
Time nor space suffice to list the
hopeful habitations, from the mud beneath the frozen pond to
the caves within the treeless, wind-swept peaks, where life
sleeps in full assurance of the resurrection.
In the plant world, no annual withered
away before it had laden the wind, the fur of moving
creatures, or the ground about its base with new plants
carefully packaged for transportation and storage until the
season of new birth. The perennials also sent forth their
seeds and then withdrew their life forces into the roots to
rest: a savings account of nature on demand of spring. The
trees, the masterpieces of plant life, rested, disrobed and
unprotected against winter's most killing attacks. Disrobed?
The leaves were gone, but only to carry on elsewhere their
life-supplying functions. They clothed the ground,
protecting plant roots, sheltering insects and small
animals. But the trees bore next summer's foliage and
fruitage in waterproof, frostproof containers, some
fur-lined, some varnished, some hidden under the bark-all in
anticipation of a future life. And the great river of the
sap had withdrawn to its mysterious subterranean springs to
await the call of the Lifegiver this spring.
Nature knew it, though foolish man may
have doubted it, that it is the word of One who does not lie
that says: "Seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and
summer and winter . . . shall not cease."
Doubt a resurrection, a future life? If
you did last fall, it was blind misinterpretation of
nature's hopefulness. If you do so this spring, it will be
in the face of world-wide visible evidence. The spirit of
life pervades the globe itself and all its animate and
vegetative products. Will your soul persist in choosing
death, when you might come to Him and have life?
