Pastor's Column

Winter can be a draining time for many of us. The cold bites through our clothes, leaving us vulnerable to disease and ill temperament. The thawing and refreezing of slush and lice throws our balance and challenges our abilities to get to where we most need to go. Its early darkness encourages us to sequester ourselves into our houses, which sometimes leaves us feeling isolated and depressed. Winter in a temperate zone is always an unpredictable time so those among us who like well-laid plans and speedy delivery find ourselves learning once again that our world does not work according to our standards of speed and organization. As an always recovering control freak, I find winter to be a draining season indeed.

Yet nothing soothes my spirit as much as softly floating snow on days when I do not have somewhere to go. I enjoy watching it cover the brown grass, the leftover leaves, the skeletons of trees, and the scattered litter that blew down the street I live on. After enough snow falls and the light falls just so, the trees glitter and glare, the earth is swept clean in white, and the air hang onto silence. The night sky deepens into an inky peace that is rarer than the darkest amethyst. The world has somehow been purged of its ugliness and seems to hold more of the beauty it began with, a beauty that God gave it in its first moments.

I know that still beauty won’t last. It will be marred by car tracks, foot prints, and salt sludge soon enough. But the memory of that beauty haunts and reminds of what we are meant to be in God’s eye. The Psalm I have quoted above is one attributed to David. The superscription above it tells us that David wrote it soon after he had been confronted by the prophet Nathan about the affair he had with Bathsheba. This affair was a particularly messy one; David not only broke his marriage vows (not a new problem for David) but he also had Bathsheba’s husband Uriah killed so he could easily marry her to cover up an unintended pregnancy. He had, as it would be fitting for a king, made a royal mess out of his and many people’s lives. He also believed, as is typical of kings and other powerful people, he could make it pretty enough for no one to notice.

God did and sent Nathan to confront him. Once confronted, David, to his credit, recognized he had been caught and made no excuses for his behavior. He apologized. He accepted the consequences of his actions. He begged for healing. He asked for a chance to start over. He asked to be given a clean start, to be made whiter than snow.

I am sure that the people of the Bible knew of snow even though their climate was semi-arid and nearing the warmth of the equatorial regions. Snow, however, was something that covered the mountains and was unmarked by human footprints. They also knew it was the source of the water that kept their land fertile when the spring thaws sent fresh and clean streams seeping down the mountainsides. This snow easily became a symbol for all that was clean and fresh about the land God gave them; it began a sign of purity, a sign of unstained relationship between the God who gave and created and what God had created. To be called whiter than the snow was something to be aimed for, something to be desired when it came to their relationship with God.

It is something that we should aim for as well. To be whiter than the freshly fallen snow. To be as clean and as unstained as new snow under the night sky. Thanks be to the God who sends us this snow to remind of what we should aim for. Thanks be to God whose love restores and cleans us, no matter what mishaps, sins, and mistakes we have made. Thanks be to God who refreshes us like fresh water flowing down a spring-fired mountainside. For all those things to be thankful for, I say, we should celebrate God’s gift of fresh and clean snow. So let it snow.

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