BackstageThere is a line in the middle of the Bible that I reach for the way you reach for a coat by the door — without thinking, because I know exactly where it hangs and I know it will keep me warm. It comes from the great love song at the heart of the Scriptures, the Song of Songs, and it is a lover calling to the beloved to come away, and the reason he gives her is the season.
Arise, he says. Come with me. For look — the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared on the earth. The time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
I need you to hear how much is packed into that. It is, on its surface, a love poem — a young man calling a young woman out into a spring morning. But the ancient teachers of my people read it as something larger, a picture of the love between Yahuah and the ones He has set His heart on, and the church has sung it that way for centuries too. I will be honest with you that this is reading, not chapter and verse of plain command. But I will also tell you that some truths are too big to fit inside a single literal frame, and the love that made the world is one of them, and this song has carried more homesick believers through more long nights than almost anything else in the Book. So let me hand it to you the way it was handed to me: as the voice of Love itself, calling out over a season that has held on far too long.
The winter is described as a thing that ends
Here is the first thing I want you to notice, and it is so simple you might walk past it. The winter is past. Not managed. Not survived. Past. It is spoken of as a thing that is over, a chapter with a back cover, a cold that had a limit all along.
Because when you are inside a winter, that is exactly the thing you cannot believe. A long cold season does not feel like a chapter. It feels like the climate. It feels permanent, like the way things simply are now and will always be — the quiet where the music used to be, the grief that has gone on so long you have stopped expecting it to lift, the prayer you have prayed so many times you say it now out of habit rather than hope. Winter's cruelest trick is that it erases your memory of spring. It convinces you that you have always been cold and always will be.
And into that, the song does not argue. It does not explain the winter or justify it or tell you it was good for you. It just announces, with the calm certainty of someone reading a calendar, that it is over. The rain is gone. That word rain here is not the good rain a farmer waits for — it is the gray, endless, driving wet of the dead season, the kind that keeps you indoors and shrinks your world to the size of a shuttered room. And Love says: gone. The sky has changed. Look up.
The flowers came before you felt warm
The second thing I love is the order of what he points at.
The flowers have appeared. The turtledove is back and singing. Notice — these are not things the beloved made happen. She did not schedule the spring or earn it or produce a single blossom. While she was still inside, still braced against the cold, the earth was already turning without her. The flowers came up on their own. The birds came back on their own. The season changed while she was still dressed for winter, and the lover's whole message is essentially: the world outside your window has already moved on from the cold — come out and catch up to it.
I have watched this be true in the deepest way in the lives of people I love. Spring in the soul almost never announces itself by how you feel first. It announces itself by small green things appearing that you did not manufacture — an unexpected mercy, a door you assumed was locked swinging open, a morning where the weight is half an ounce lighter than yesterday and you cannot say why. The flowers show up before the warmth reaches you. And the invitation is to trust the flowers over your own numb hands. To believe the evidence of the season instead of the memory of the cold.
The time of singing has come
But the line I actually live on is the middle one. The time of singing has come.
I make music for a living, so let me tell you what a winter does to a singer. It does not usually take your voice in a dramatic way. It takes it quietly. The songs you used to sing without thinking start to feel like lies you are not entitled to. You go through the motions in a room full of worshipers and your own mouth feels far away. You do not decide to stop singing; the singing just recedes, like the birds did, and one day you notice the silence has been going on a long time and you cannot remember when it started. If you have hung your harp in the willow trees of a hard season, you know the exact quiet I mean.
And what this line promises is that the silence, too, has a limit. The time of singing has a come attached to it. It arrives. It is on the calendar. There is a morning appointed when the voice comes back the way the turtledove comes back — not because you forced it, but because the season it belongs to has finally rolled around again. Song is seasonal in the Scriptures. It is tied to spring, to thaw, to the rain being over. And the God who runs the seasons has never once let a winter become the whole story of a life He loves.
Come away
So here is the invitation, and I want to give it to you as gently and as certainly as the song gives it.
If you are reading this from inside a long cold quiet, hear the voice that is calling over the top of it. It is not scolding you for how tired you are. It is not asking you to gin up a warmth you do not have. It is simply telling you the truth about the season: the winter is past. The rain that shut you in is spending itself out. There are green things coming up that you did not plant, and if you look for them instead of at the old grey sky, you will see that the world Love made has already begun to turn back toward the sun.
And your voice is coming back with it. The time of singing has come — not the time of pretending, not the time of performing, but the real thawing return of a song you thought you had lost for good. So come away. Get up from the shuttered room. Step out where the flowers already are. The One who is calling you did not bring you through the winter to leave you speechless on the other side of it. He brought you through so that you would be standing in the open, in the warm light, when the first note comes back to your mouth — and this time you will know, all the way down, that spring was never in doubt.
