Katy Lee writes...

During the first week in March, I had the opportunity to spend my first college spring break in Coronado, California with three friends from my dorm. Not to brag, but if you have never heard of Coronado, you might want to consider learning about it by watching the Travel Chanel’s “Best 10 U.S. beaches” countdown; my friend, whose father is in the Navy, has the privilege of living on this beautiful island off of San Diego where year-round the average temperature is about 70 degrees. After spending the last four months stuck in the bitter, windy Chicago winter, we spent our last two miserable days before break in a frozen sleeting blizzard, in absolute disgust of Illinois and with desperate hopes that our plane flight wasn’t canceled. Thankfully we made it off Wheaton’s campus and four hours later arrived in sunny Southern California.
I did not realize how much I had winter depression until I came out of the cold and darkness; it was amazing! We had left Chicago with fleece jackets, and mere hours later were bathed in tropical sunlight with toes in the sand. It was absolute heaven, and that “something” (probably Vitamin A) that had been missing in my life was suddenly there. I could hardly handle it, I was so overjoyed to see mountains, a new city and most of all the bright Pacific Ocean.
I wanted to share this because I think so often we let ourselves live in a spiritual winter without even realizing it--and by that I mean the January/February sort of winter, not the November/December winter. At least at the beginning the newness of white snow is exciting, but our spiritual winter is more like C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where it is “always winter and never Christmas.” Slowly our day-to-day walk with God becomes a kind of chore, boring and almost so “everyday” that it does not even seem special. For me it came it came out in the form of stagnancy for my relationships and schoolwork. When I was not letting God be the living, active force behind everything I was doing, life became unexciting. I was bitter and selfish about being cold, physically and spiritually, and was uninterested in anything new. When I came back from vacation I felt like it was Easter morning for my spirit: because I’d let in the sun, I felt a newness of life, and a readiness to enjoy things again, to walk and play outside. I hope this Lenten season can be more and more about letting God be a part of everything we think and do, dousing our lives in the sunlight of prayer and His word: only then will we experience true joy, whether we’re on the beach or in the snow, and see the true joy the disciples had at the first Easter.