City Snow

When we lived in town, my mother didn't care much for snow. I remember driving past embankments grass covered in summer but besmirched in winter with tire-flung slush. The traffic churned white powder into deep gray gunk, and the atmosphere assumed the unhealthy dankness of a cold in the head. When I turned thirteen, we moved to a village of 300 tucked in amongst miles of fields and timber. Suddenly, winter became a thing of peculiar glory--treacherous at times, and sharply beautiful. The sun flamed colored glitterings from individual crystals under the maple in front of our house, and the road beyond it retained a postcard purity even into the afternoon. Fields behind the house offered their own arctic wasteland, a chance for first footsteps onto the moon,an opportunity to tread where no one else had ever pressed his foot. Blue shadows rested beside drifts along the fence line, and the ditches sported wind sculptures like cake frosting or snow white peaks of meringue. On especially cold days, wraith veils of snow snaked across the road like the angel of death in the old Ten Commandments movie. An austere joy thrived in the miles and miles of relentless white.

I live in the city again. This morning, trudging to the post office through uncleared sidewalks next to four lanes of traffic, I noted gray spatters flung far across last night's snow and grimaced as droplets misted my face. My perennial struggle here is identifying myself with my brothers who live packed among human-induced problems in this over crowded part of earth. Never mind my own sins and struggles--I'd rather consider their problems as something alien imposed upon my quiet little country self. But if ankle-deep, sludgy snow is not my native turf, and if this is Christmas time, isn't this sort of walking a kind of privilege? Just think, our God chose to identify himself so completely with us that He became one of us, walking our roads as if they were natural for Him! A reminder of God's chosen closeness to us is worth dirty snow in my shoes.

"Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness" (Philippians 2:5-7, NIV).