Hyacinths and the world in dormancy

Have you ever noticed our world is in dormancy? What I mean is, things are aching, creaking, breaking, shuddering with potential but not quite getting to fullness. Happiness lasts only momentarily. Beauty is fleeting. Things are in decay.


It's like there's something not quite right with the world. We sense it should be blooming, but instead it's fading.


I want to suggest that this sense is no illusion, but rather points to a greater reality.


If I can use a gardening analogy, it's like the world is a Hyacinth bulb.


Hyacinth bulbs are on my mind, because my housemate Kris has been growing them in jars on every vacant surface of our house, so bear with me.


To make them grow, you rest a bulb on the lip of a jar filled with water for six weeks in cool darkness. During this time, the bulb thinks it's underground and grows roots. It's getting ready to support life. It starts to grow a little shoot, until it's ready to be brought into the sunlight.


Once brought out, it shoots up and flowers, like the one in the picture. It bursts forth in a matter of hours into a living, green plant.


Our world is like a hyacinth bulb in the dark. It's waiting for blistering light to beckon it into fullness of life. The question is, what is this light?


To be honest, the light's already come into the world, but the world didn't recognise it: "The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him."


The world was made through Him. The light is Jesus. Even the Jews, his own people, didn't recognise him as the light:


"He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him."


But there were some that realised he really was the light the world was waiting for, and for them, he is their light and life. "...To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God."


I have received the light, not out of some great wisdom of my own, but because it blinded me one day. I had been like a seed, dormant in the ground until Jesus woke me up. And one day in the future, the light will come again the world will be renewed.


I was reading the King's Cross by Keller the other day and here's how he puts it:

"If you put seeds into a pot of soil and then put it away in the dark, away from the sun, the seeds go into dormancy. They can't grow to their potential. But if you bring the pot with seeds into the presence of the sun, all that has been locked within them bursts forth. The bible says everything in this world - not just we human beings but even the plants, the trees, the rocks - is dormant. These things are just shadows of what they have been, would be, and will be in the presence of their Creator. When the Lamb of God presides over the final feast and the presence of God covers the earth again, the trees and the hills will clap and dance, so alive will they be."

Can you imagine this? Do you want this? Then welcome the light.