Incident Report

A girl left her home this morning in a little 97 Geo Metro coup, starting out late to work as usual. You probably do not care to hear this morning's reasons for such tardiness, but she would tell you-- it was her horse, and the snow, and the extra ice on the windshield, and the town trucks who had left a berm in front of her car, Dinah.

She knew she was going too fast. She had just taken water up to her horse's pasture a half mile up the winding dirt road, had driven down way too briskly for a snow-covered surface, and had decided that she needed to slow down as she headed down the steepest part of the hill. She was thinking especially of the very narrow and sharp corner at the bottom, an old railroad trestle. She had only ever met people in the railroad trestle about three times in her life, but of course there was someone passing through at the same moment this morning, when her car was not responding to any of her instructions whatsoever and when the nagging "late" word had settled down into her right foot. She found herself headed straight for the driver's door of a big GMC Dinah-eating truck, a certain crunch inevitable...

It was as if Someone had turned her at the last possible second--Dinah's wheels found sudden traction and speeded up the snowbank on the right side of the road, imbedding her firmly in a snowbank recording over two feet worth of accumulated snow after only grazing the side of the truck. And then there was a man, whom the girl had never met before, coming through the trestle, to stop and pull her out, to chuckle at her bumper sticker, and to give her a friendly wave as she headed off-- no ambulance, no policeman, only some copied insurance information. And if you had looked close, you might have seen two grateful sparkles that clung to the girl's lashes but never quite marked a path down her face. Later this afternoon if you had been watching you might once again have seen her blue eyes fill with wonder as she discovered that her driver's side mirror was completely gone--maybe that is where He put His hand.

New Years: A New Clarity of Mission

Now is the chance to look at where you have been, a dangerous clifftop shrouded in fog, and see where God has brought you this year. The change may have been gradual, and hard to believe, and scary, but the ending is a morning of fleeing shadows and blossoming sunshine-- a winter morning all the same, but the best possible... the future is before you, a gift.

As you enter upon a new year, let it be with an earnest resolve to have your course onward and upward. Let your life be more elevated and exalted than it has hitherto been. . . . Aim to honor God in everything, always and everywhere. Carry your religion into everything.

-Ellen White

Muse no longer on the snowflakes filling up your hood or the cliffs with seemingly no end, ragged and brutal and cold. Even as we speak the Wind is moving, guiding the mist away as you have the faith to believe He can do it. And there it is before you, a clean plain of snow, awake and ready to be blessed by fresh tracks.

More Snow

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
snow on snow...
-Christina Rossetti

Arabian snow- slightly yellow
with freckles

My little horse must think it queer
to stop without a farmhouse near...
-Robert Frost

Tamaracks in their winter best:
white instead of green or gold

Cheery: A little yellow house

In a Word

Very cold here, rather below zero but
Every minute of it invigorating and delightful,
Refreshing to the core.
Most snowy here, rather two feet of it
On the ground and trees and roof... and me,
Not respecting personhood but covering all,
Touching even the sky with a hint of falling gray.

Tiny Matters

Think about snow for a moment; each flake a design that might fit on a pinhead, each cold little piece of precipitation an extravagant scrap of lace formed around a grain of sand. Just one tiny speck of dirt is necessary to form that jot of pure white, and likewise each intricate snowflake is needed to create what we call a snowstorm, the falling of these many small pieces of wonder onto our earth. With that in mind, try to imagine the numbers accumulated in two feet of fluff, attempt to wrap your mind around the sheer immensity held in such a flurry of creativity.