“He giveth snow like wool; he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.”
~Psalm 147:15-17 

As I have mentioned before in these writings, some weeks are just fuller than others. Do find that to be true in your own life? I am finding myself knee deep in a couple of those very full weeks. This is not a complaint but an observation. I am blessed to be able to do all I am doing. It just all happened to fall at the same time. Many extra meetings in addition to the ones I attend on a regular basis. Two retreats in two weeks which are more working meetings with an overnight thrown in than true retreats. All good stuff. Just a lot of it.

This past weekend I was blessed to drive west of the Cities to our church’s retreat center near Annandale. I had given myself plenty of time for the drive that takes little over an hour. I was driving in the middle of the day, not at rush hour, so I was privileged to take in the ways in which the city quickly rolls into suburbs and finally to farmland with lakes thrown in for good measure. Of course, there is little if any snow so the normal February landscape seems jarring, out of place somehow, as if, like Rip Van Winkle, we have fallen asleep and missed a season or two.

But Friday’s drive and, indeed, the whole weekend did not disappoint. While the snow was absent from the fields, the trees and bushes along the roads made up for it. All the trees, evergreens or otherwise, were decked out in white crystals suspended against the gray skies. The phenomenon known as hoar frost covered everything for as far as the eye could see. I was thankful to be able to mosey along at a slower pace while looking out the window like an alien dropped into a Doctor Zhivago set. Such beauty!

At the retreat, this white covered world became the topic that united us. “How does it work?” “Why does it happen?” “Look how it is starting to melt and drop on that side of the tree but not on the other.” “What does the name mean anyway?” “ Watch how the light shines through the crystals!” “It looks like the trees have grown white hair.” And on and on.

Of course the work we were engaged in was important. We met. We sang. We prayed. We made decisions and asked more questions. Friendships were formed and old ones renewed. We created plans and rolled out hopes for our work together. All good things.

But as we left the retreat late on Saturday afternoon, the sun had finally broken through the clouds that had held us for days. The sky was turning lavender as we drove through fields still visible with nubs of corn from fall’s harvest. The lavender glinted off the white trees creating shadows worthy of an Impressionistic artist.  At one point overhead, a flock of large, white birds flew in ragged formation. Snow geese? I didn’t know. They just seemed to fit right into whatever picture was being painted in the moment, as if the director of some large production had said’ “Now. Cue the big, white birds. Fly right there. Go.”

Their flight and the entire scene seemed to be meant to stun, to amaze, to fill us with awe. And it worked. My breath left my chest and I knew that I was, I am, a part of something huge and wonderful and beautiful.

And it took the tiny, white, glistening crystals of the hoar frost to remind me.