SNOW MAGIC
There’s something magic about snow! Soft, silent, falling gently, it covers the landscape with a mantle of pure white, transforming the ordinary into something spectacular.
Ordinary rocks, trees, mountains, plains, even ugly roads and rubbish heaps are given a new lustre! It is not surprising that the Old Testament prophet used snow as a metaphor for the transformation of human lives:
“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow”… (Isaiah 1:18 c.f. Psalm 51:7)
Even the ugliest, “vilest offender” can be forgiven, restored, and transformed.
Grace, like snow, is transformative.
Despite the cold, snow invites us to play. We just rug up. Children revel in tobogganing, making snowmen, or having a snow fight, while adults will take to their ski’s or snowboards. The sensation of skiing, even cross country,
is absolutely exhilarating. Speeding down a slope on frictionless ski’s is quite frightening! Unforgettable indeed.
But it will be short lived. Sooner or later the snow will thaw, and disappear.
Winter must give way to Spring. So our enjoyment of it is ephemeral… to be admired and enjoyed only while it lasts.
The blessings of life may be brief and unexpected, but are to be accepted and enjoyed with thanksgiving.
The real wonder of snow is the snowflake itself. It has been claimed that no two snowflakes are exactly the same, and this is substantially true.
It is certainly true for larger, mature snowflakes (I have had them the size of a 20c coin land on my shoulders!). Smaller, immature flakes,
however, may have the same form.
A snowflake starts as a dust grain floating in a cloud. Water vapour in the air sticks to the dust grain and the resulting droplets turn into ice. Then a prism forms with six faces.
A cavity forms in each prism because ice grows fastest at the edges… six branches form the
corners of a hexagon” (Britannica Website).
Every snowflake is simply frozen H2O in hexagonal form, yet each has its own distinctive “fingerprint”. Every mature snowflake is different.
Imagine! That’s mind boggling!
Check the web for images; they are wonderfully endless!
How many snowflakes does it take to make a snowdrift? How can each one be the same in structure yet have a different pattern? Is this purely accidental, the result of endless evolutionary events, or does it reflect the awesome mind of an intelligent Creator?
I have an American friend who was “socked in” by snow last Christmas.
He wrote to me ….
“Our morning was wet, but our evening became blanketed in white.
We worshipped the snowflake Maker.…So early this morning I walked
through new snow and followed the tracks (I assumed, then confirmed) were from squirrel feet. I worshipped the squirrel Maker as I walked ….
Because of icy slick roads we hibernated and the church gathering was cancelled. We worshipped the calm day Maker Remembering Christmas’s past.”
Our Great Creator devised a complex yet simple, individually distinctive droplet of ice, which is replicated in thousands and millions
of different forms. How amazing is that!