Snow and Wonder

I adore snow.

It’s delicate and beautiful and free floating through the cold air and transforming dull winter earth into an enchanted, mystical landscape. Snow means childhood and Christmas and falling in love. It’s twirling and ice and coziness. It’s mittens and peering excitedly out the window in the morning and peppermint coffee.

The day after Thanksgiving in 1958 the poet Anne Sexton wrote a letter saying, “I was just looking out the window…and it was, yes, it was, snowing. I am young. I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe in everything. Christ is in his manger and Santa in heaven.”

Another one of my favorite characters, Lorelai Gilmore, feels similarly about snow. She explains her love affair with snow thusly, “When I was five, I had a really bad ear infection and I had been home in bed for a week and I was very sad. So I wished really hard that something wonderful would happen to me, and I woke up the next morning and it had snowed. And I was sure that some fairy godmother had done it just for me. It was my little present.” To which, her best friend and, later, the love of her life, Luke, responds, “Your parents never explained the concept of weather to you?”

I actually had a remarkably similar conversation the other day. Nashville was anticipating a snowstorm and, giddy with excitement, I was beginning to elucidate snow’s awesomeness. “It’s so pretty and white and floaty! Good things always happen when it snows!” “Sure, Ans,” my friend quipped with a faintly sweet smile, “people freeze to death, there are car accidents, but for you, it’s a winter wonderland.”

Point taken. As a (sometimes) rational grown-up, I understand that inclement weather reduces economic productivity, causes traffic hazards, prevents children from being educated, and causes real crowding in homeless shelters.

But it’s not really about snow. I get it. Snow is precipitation. Frozen water. (Forget its miraculous unique flakes for a moment…) But truly what’s amazing about snow is the wonder that it produces within my soul. In my daily life, there are few things that make me pause, overwhelmed by the undeniable beauty of something much bigger than me. Tim Keller calls a sense of wonder the “acid test” of Christianity, what distinguishes a Christian from a religious person. Keller astutely says, “If you are a Christian you have a spirit of wonder that permeates your life. You are always saying ‘how miraculous,’ ‘how interplanetary,’ ‘how unreal.’ You are always looking at yourself and saying, ‘me a Christian … incredible, miraculous, unbelievable, a joke!’ But a person who is trying to put God in their debt – there is none of that spirit of wonder at all. For example, when you show up to get your paycheck, (I am assuming that most of you work hard for your money)…When you show up for your paycheck do you say ‘Ah, BEHOLD!, you’ve paid me, you’ve given me money!?’ No, you don’t do that, you say ‘of course you paid me, I worked.’ If you ask a religious person who does not understand the grace of God, you say, ‘Are you a Christian?’ They say, ‘Of course I am a Christian, I have always been a Christian. Sure I am a Christian.’ My friends, if you are a Christian there is no ‘sure’ about it and there is no ‘of courseness’ about it, not a bit.” Keller continues, “A Christian may say ‘my career has not gone too well, my love life has not gone too well, it’s astonishing… it’s amazing that God is as good as He is to me. It’s all grace. It’s all grace. That spirit of wonder. That sense of being a miracle. That everything that comes to you being an absolute mercy.”

When snow comes, I am reminded of the larger reality that I am as utterly helpless in the world to do good or earn God’s favor as I am to control the weather. And when those perfect snowflakes inhabit the skies and dance in the wind, I should remember the common grace of God, that He gives abundantly to His children simply in steadfast love. I do not deserve grace any more than I deserve snow. But He gives both. I must wonder in this always: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow…”