The Feeling of Winter

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.” Andrew Wyeth

Winter begins today. On this day, I welcome it. It has felt like winter since the end of November and the snow and chill in the air whisper that Christmas is coming and something important is about to happen. Check back with me in the middle of February or the beginning of March when there is slushy, dirty snow and when the green is just a distant memory and all is brown and gray.

Winter can be a very hard, lonely season. Defining moments in my life, life-changing events have mostly occured during winter seasons or have ushered in a new and sometimes heartbreaking winter season of life (regardless of the actual calender date). But it is during these times, it seems, that God has done His most important, careful, loving work. Slowly, usually painfully, uprooting parts of my life that need to go, that need to die with the cold and death winter brings. And then...and then one waits in the bleakness of winter. Waits for hope, for replanting, for life, for spring. Only part of the story is showing as winter lingers on. Something bigger, much bigger, is happening underneath: new life. Spring does come or it will, and with it a greater appreciation, or maybe even reverence, of winter.

And so when February is here and the deadness of winter has really set in, I hope to remember all that is happening underneath. All I cannot see but know is there. And I hope to remember that I am just a small part of this larger Story and that spring is just around the corner.