The Beauty Of Snow

It finally snowed!

 

And snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed.

 

I got up at 5 to check this morning and was delighted with the sight.

 

I absolutely love the snow.  I love the scrunching crunch of it under your feet as you walk.  I love that it slows the world down and gives us the chance to relax and reflect.  I love how quiet and hushed everything becomes, how everything is muted.  I love that it brings people together to build snowmen and have snowball fights. 

 

But most of all, I love how beautiful the world looks when it is covered in a thick layer of soft snow.

 

Wilhelmina in Ugly Betty says,

 

"Snow is a magical blanket, it hides what's ugly and makes everything beautiful."

 

Snow can make even the ugliest of sights look beautiful.  There is a huge, towering scrap yard a few roads away from my flat, which usually looks pretty monstrous.  But today, even that was transformed into something magical.

 

The Bible describes God's grace as being like snow:

 

 

         "This is God’s Message:
         'If your sins are blood-red,
         they’ll be snow-white.
         If they’re red like crimson,
         they’ll be like wool.'"

 

         [Isaiah 1:18 MSG]

But rather than just covering over the ugliness of life, and hiding it for a while, as snow does, God's grace transforms everything it touches.  So that when it melts away, what is left is more beautiful than before.

Who Am I?

I've been rewatching one of my favourite American soaps over the past few days: Ugly Betty.  In one episode, Amanda is trying to find her birth father, after discovering that she is adopted.  She says that she will struggle to know who she is until she knows who her father is.  She says, If I don't know where I've come from, how can I know who I am?

 

I think it's the same with us sometimes: we don't really know where or who we've come from and, therefore, we don't really know who we are.

 

But Jesus was confident about who He was and where He had come from.  He knew to whom He belonged.

 

This is one of my most favourite verses in the Bible:

"Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God."
 

[John 13:3 NIV]

 
Jesus was completely confident of who He was, where He had come from and where He was going, so He was able to serve others whole-heartedly, without seeking His identity in them. 

He knew who His Father was.

It can be the same for us, if we want it: we can know and understand who our Father - our heavenly Father - is.  We can know and understand our pasts and we can know where we have come from.

And it is in understanding these things that we can understand who we really are.