I’ll start with honesty: This Monday Club email feels different. I don’t think this message is for everyone. It’s for a specific person (or persons), and some other day, in another season entirely, it will be for someone else.
Writing these words down feels raw and vulnerable, like I’m giving you a peek into my private spiritual life. I hope you’ll hold it with kindness. I hope the words find who they’re intended for.
Nine years ago, I was in the battle for my life.
Even though next year will mark a decade since I fought through the dark woods of severe depression, there are days when it still feels so fresh to me. Days where old memories move into view. Days where I look around and marvel at how much has changed.
I’m sure some seasons mark us forever. We’ll always think about them, tracing the scars they left on us.
I remember crying out to God on the floor of my childhood bedroom, asking him to speak to me. “Just say something,” I whimpered. “Something that will make me know I’m coming out of this place.”
I write these words carefully—with the utmost sense of caution—because there have been plenty of days and moments when I’ve been met with silence or when I didn’t hear God’s words or get the direction immediately. I’ve learned that hearing from God rarely comes in a dramatic fashion or an audible voice.
But on this day, amid that cry, an image of a notebook formed in my mind.
The notebook had a black spine and yellow-lined pages. An illustration of a peacock feather spread across the front, with some kind of artist’s effect that made the whole notebook shimmer. I instantly knew the notebook in the vision.
There was a tug to find that notebook. Flip through the pages.
I searched until I found it in an old Tupperware bin. A few years earlier, I’d filled the peacock notebook with lines packed with dreams, blog ideas, prayers, and to-do lists.
I flipped until I reached one page and a collection of words huddled in the margin:
“Gather all your worries and give them to Me, for I have already delivered you from this evil. I have not forgotten you—you are My little dandelion.”
I traced those words with my fingers. They stunned me. They’d been written years earlier, though I couldn’t recall exactly when. And what had I been going through during that time? And what parts of me didn’t know this would be a message I would need in the future? It felt like a strange prophecy that had been planted in that notebook for such a time as this.
The most striking detail was the part about the little dandelion. It was odd because I am not a fan of flower metaphors. I’m okay with the symbol of a buffalo, a bird, a mountain, or a river, but the imagery stops at flowers.
And yet here it was… a little dandelion.
I remember pulling open my computer and frantically Googling. Years earlier, when I first wrote the words, I hadn’t bothered to wonder about the symbolism of the dandelion, but I knew that this little dandelion was for me in this current pit.
If you dig deeper into dandelions’ symbolism, they represent resilience and survival, hope and healing.
Even deeper, they symbolize the start of a new season, specifically spring. When people see dandelions sprouting across the green grass– it indicates that spring is coming (or it is already here).
It was mid-February when I saw the notebook in my mind and traced my fingers along the prophetic collection of words that assured me, “I have not forgotten you—you are My little dandelion.”
I felt this deep knowing in my spirit that the depression was going to begin to shift and lift with the coming of spring that year. Spring was coming soon. That moment felt so holy. It felt like a lifeline dropping down into the dark for me.
I repeated these words to myself over and over: Spring is coming. Spring is coming.
It felt like mustard seeds planted in the deep, dark woods. Suddenly, I could hold on longer.
…
Just the other day, I was sitting quietly in my office, journaling and praying, when the memory of me with the notebook on the floor of my childhood bedroom broke through. It was out of nowhere and entirely out of place. I hadn’t thought of it in years.
I heard the words, “Spring is coming,” rising in my spirit.
To be honest, the whole experience felt strange. But then I thought, maybe I’m meant to carry this message to someone who needs it. Perhaps someone needs a lifeline dropped into the dark for them, or needs to hear:
Spring is coming.
You’ve traveled this road for a long time, and it has been immensely dark in some pockets and bends. But you’ve been seen through it all– covered by a grace you can’t always feel or comprehend, but it hangs over you like a cloak. It wraps you in and does not release.
Spring is coming.
I know this has been such a long season of feeling unseen, but what if the hiddenness held its own purpose? What if, in the hiddenness, qualities were forged that will you take into this next season?
We forget that fire forms us—that shaping comes through heat. In the fiery process, the dross falls away, and the gold emerges. No one ever said it wouldn’t be painful– downright costing– to become golden.
Spring is coming.
May you speak those three words like a breath prayer over your tired, worn-down spirit.
New things are starting to emerge from beneath the surface– in places where you swore off growth entirely. You thought these things were buried so deep that you’d never recover them again, but things you lost are returning to life.
Parts of yourself you discounted or tore down are reemerging.
Spring is coming.
Spring is coming.
Spring is coming.
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