Right after my third-grade self screamed and did a little jumping dance around our living room, I rushed to wake up my brother to tell him it was a snow day. There was no time to waste! Snow was such a rare occurrence in Georgia that it had to be celebrated when it came. I dressed myself in at least seven layers of pink clothing as my aspirations for the day raced through my head.
In between my attempts to make “snow cream” and sliding down our backyard hill on a repurposed cardboard box, I would sit and watch the snow. My bedroom growing up had a 12-foot ceiling, and a window that scaled the entire height of it and almost the whole width of the room. I’d pull up the heavy wood blinds and just sit in the floor and watch.
There’s just something so tranquil about snow falling. I’m talking about the flurries– we never had any crazy blizzard snow in the South, at least not while I was alive. But watching the tiny flakes float through the air at their own leisure and then landing wherever they may please is so oddly captivating.
It was always a silent and slow process, but if I sat there long enough, I would start to see our yard look like someone had enveloped it in a white blanket. The only word my 8-year-old mind could use to describe it was beautiful.
Now, 13 years later, I sit in front of a window in the heart of Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m once again watching the snow flurries fall. The background is much different from my 12-foot window haven in suburbia. A train billows as it passes by a few blocks away,a siren wails along somewhere in the distance. Thousands of cars roll along the highway to my right, and steam rises from several of the buildings in my view. Instead of wandering to the baby carrots I’ll use to make a tiny snowman this afternoon, my thoughts roam to where I’ll live and how I’ll make money in the coming months.
And yet, amidst all that chaos and constant movement, here I sit, still taking in the tranquility of snow flurries.
Our lives are a lot like a city during snowfall sometimes. The sky is gray, and everything around us is moving at a rapid pace. There are a thousand different directions we could go, and we’re never quite sure which one to move toward.
And yet, God’s grace is always there, falling down on us like the snow flurries. It’s steady, but never angry or rushed. It sprinkles over us in the midst of chaos and confusion. It sprinkles over us when we don’t know which direction to turn. And sooner or later we stop and look around, and we’re covered in his grace, and we can finally realize that he’s carried us through a dark time. And now, like that blanket of snow, our hearts are beautifully refined into something pure again.
God uses time. Just like we never know how long it will take for snow to stick to the ground, we never know how much time it will take for the Lord to heal something in us.
But if we sit still and wait for the snow to transform the world we see, sooner or later everything will be white. And God has proven time and time again, that if we will be still in His presence and patiently wait for his timing, he’ll make our battered and weary hearts as white as the beautiful snow.
“God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding. He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’ and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’ So that everyone he has made may know his work, he stops all people from their labor.” Job 37:5-7
Leave a Reply