White as Snow

When I was in college, I really struggled to understand God's grace.  I understood it well enough to verbally explain it and I'd defend His gracious love vehemently, but a functional understanding?  I couldn't grasp it.  I felt so compelled to be perfect, that without my efforts, He'd hate me.  He'd give up on me. 





 One day it snowed.  And like a love letter, it spoke to my heart with all the surprise and understanding of God's deep, gracious love for me.  I remember finding my friend, Angie, and grabbing a camera.  I must've taken a whole roll of film.  We ran around campus and I kept saying, "I get it!"  God's love for us, His grace, is like the snow.  It comes to us.  It comes whether I've begged for it or not. 


 
On that particular day, the snow came down with a persistence and covered everything until it was all different.  All pure and white.  I can't make it snow.  I can pray for it. But I can't make it.  And God loves me.  Not because I can make Him love me.  But He chooses to.  He promises. 

Eager footprints in the first snow of the season.

 Now, living in the upper-mid-west, I love the snow.  And we sure get plenty of it. I love it because it continues to be like a love letter from the Lord, reminding me, teaching me.  When all that's left on the ground is dry, dead, void of color and life, the snow comes.  Dressing the earth in splendid white.  Working life deep beneath the ground, for come spring, the bulbs will burst forth with new blossoms, fresh grass will appear, and life will cycle through into a new season.
 

A perfect snow angel.

Being reminded that God is always working life in darkness:  the babies in the darkness of their mother's wombs being knit together, the seeds in the ground, and all of God's baptized children, taken, with Christ, into the darkness of the tomb to be raised to new life with Him.  Funny to be approaching Advent and having an Easter moment, but there it it, nevertheless.