Change is in the air. We can sense it, smell it, see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, feel it. Spring is here even as the chill in the early morning air serves to remind us that the passage of winter, the transition of the seasons, is not quite through with us yet. We are ready to let go of the winter, knowing that spring is our gateway to summer. Vaccination is here with the medicinal promise, if we are careful, of relief and release, of a return to modicums of health and healing, proximity and touch, restrictions lifted and the sweet efflorescence of community and life. We embrace glad change. We brace ourselves for needed change yet to come.

Intolerance is here, indignity and incivility, hatred and fear, violence and demise, engendering grief and denying persons of limb and life. Inequality is here, at the borderlands where migrants amass yearning to breathe free, ignominiously placed in holding cells, for indefinite time, in the homeland of the free. Injustice is here, from Louisville to Minneapolis, Atlanta to Boulder, and points beyond and between, in the legal, legislative, corporate, and communal hierarchies of human ranking we make. We live in and between these tensions, the welter of promise and peril, joy and pain, suffering and hope. We live and work, we long and pray, for better days. 

Something more is happening, moving, shining forth in this long season of our exhaustion, loss, separation and pain. More and more, we stand inside of life, pondering life, bearing witness to life, of vistas once unseen. We are restored and rejuvenated and invited to contend with our uncertainties and grief. In this Lenten season, there is hope. In our collective winter, comes the spring. This year as never before, and yet all over again, we are called to take stock of what truly matters to us and to move. In the body of the Christian faithful, the passion of Jesus stirs. In the midst of crucifixion, life emerges. In the deep distress of mind, body and soul, renewal comes. In this incomparable season, faith happens. We are no longer the same. This is the promise of the resurrection. Thanks be to God.

Alton B. Pollard, III
President
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary