Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to speaking with joy. Today you are seated with me on the front stoop of my flat where I'm enjoying a beautiful, sunshiney spring day. Actually it's not entirely true. It was much sunnier this morning

when I first set out. And when I decided to record this podcast, even though I know it'll be a bit

louder and perhaps distracting, I wanted to record it with you in the spring and in the sunshine

where you can hear my laughing seagulls and my singing wrens.

It's been from this little concrete stoop that I have watched spring come,

and it's from this little place that I felt such a freedom in a time that feels so constricted.

I've been struck as I sit here and watch my apple trees start to blossom and the little

buds of different flowers come up in my untended garden.

That spring goes on and summer and winter turns on despite the rest of the world, despite

the human world, coming to a sand still. And to me there's such a comfort in that.

There's a comfort in knowing that even as we are all kind of in crisis and in this kind of standstill,

there is this beauty, these rhythms of nature that do not stop.

I think of the passage in Genesis after the flood when God

establishes a covenant with Noah and he says, for as long as the earth shall endure, winter

and springtime, summer and harvest will go on, and that we're meant to look at these seasons

as they pass as this kind of promise of God's ongoing grace,

even in the midst of all of the bizarre things humans bind themselves doing and suffering.

And so for this episode of the Escapecast, I wanted to invite you to escape with me into spring

into this season that goes on even as human events are in turmoil.

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