When My Heart Leapt Up in Spring

Spring 2022 came after a long stretch of busyness in our teaching life.

The classroom had been full of demands — lesson preparation, online adjustments, marking endless assignments, encouraging tired students, answering anxious parents. We loved teaching, but love does not cancel exhaustion.

By the time the two-week spring holiday arrived, we were not merely tired — we were inwardly drained.

But George and I had been quietly preparing for this rest long before it arrived.

Every month, we budgeted carefully. Teaching income is never extravagant. We listed our necessities first. Savings next. We denied ourselves many impulsive pleasures. And then, in one small corner of our notebook, we wrote:

“Spring Retreat.”

It was a simple dream — a Tudor house in the countryside, surrounded by meadow and daffodils. A fairy-tale cottage with timber frames and red bricks. A garden that looked like it belonged in a poem.

Perhaps it was my love for English literature. Perhaps it was my heart’s longing for quiet beauty. But William Wordsworth’s Daffodils had lived inside me for years:

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills…”

When we finally arrived, the house stood there just as I had imagined — proud yet humble, wrapped in spring blossoms. Daffodils danced in the breeze, their golden heads nodding as if greeting us.

That afternoon, standing in the meadow with open arms, I felt my heart whisper:

“My heart leaps up…”

It was not luxury. It was simplicity. We woke without alarm clocks.
We walked through the meadow.
We sat back-to-back on the grass, facing the cottage, smiling like two children who had found a secret garden.

For two weeks, we were not rushing teachers.
We were not planners.
We were not answering messages.

We were simply husband and wife — breathing, noticing, thanking.

In the quiet of that Tudor dream house, I understood something deeper:

God created rest before He created deadlines.
He planted gardens before He gave us tasks.

Even Jesus withdrew to quiet places.

Rest is not indulgence.
It is alignment with how we were created.

When we returned home after the holiday, our circumstances were the same — but we were different.

We had remembered how to breathe.
We had remembered how to look at flowers without thinking of the clock.
We had remembered that our worth is not measured by productivity.

Spring 2022 did not make us any richer.

It made us richer in gratitude.

And even now, whenever I see daffodils, my heart still leaps up — not only because of poetry, but because of a faithful God who allows busy teachers to rest under His sky.

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” - Ecclesiastes 3:1

 And whenever spring returns and daffodils begin to dance, my heart remembers that rest is God’s invitation — and once again, it leaps up.

🌟 

Light for the Journey

Georgia

(Written from memories of our days together in the Spring of 2022.)