The First Morning of Spring on the Holbrook Farm

In March of 1987, dairy farmer Ellen Holbrook of Addison County, Vermont, opened the barn doors after five months of bitter winter. Her twelve Holstein calves had spent since October in the dim warmth of the stall — fed, sheltered, but confined. When the doors swung wide that Tuesday morning, the calves stood blinking in the threshold. Then sunlight hit their backs. One by one, then all at once, they bolted into the pasture — bucking, spinning, kicking their hind legs sideways in that ungainly joy only a young animal knows.

Ellen later told her pastor she wept watching them. Not because of the calves, exactly, but because she understood something. She had spent that same winter nursing her husband Ray through his final weeks of pancreatic cancer. The grief had kept her in her own kind of stall — dark, necessary, survivable. But standing in that March sun, feeling its warmth press against her face, she felt something she hadn't felt in months. Not happiness, not yet. Healing.

The prophet Malachi wrote to a people who had endured their own long winter — spiritual apathy, broken covenants, the silence of God stretching across generations. Yet he promised that for those who revered the name of the Lord, the Sun of Righteousness would rise "with healing in its wings." And they would go out leaping like calves released from the stall. The same God who kept Ellen through that Vermont winter keeps His promise still — light breaks, warmth returns, and what was confined finds itself suddenly, gloriously free.