Heading out this morning into the snow...

Heading out this morning into the snow: pastoral visits and all the rest.  It looks like there is about 3 inches so far ~ with freezing rain to follow ~ made me think of this tune we were working on at a party last week.

Hmmmm... snow is getting worse.  I won't let it get me down ~ too pretty ~ but I might just revise my day, yes?  To everything there is a season, yes? And this season we've missed a lot of the cold and snow, so maybe this is just a time to embrace it?  Old Robert Frost, from just over the mountain, once wrote:

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

So, let's see what opening my heart wide to the first real storm of the winter might bring today? Psalm 46 says:

God is a safe place to hide, ready to help when we need him.
We stand fearless at the cliff-edge of doom,
courageous in seastorm and earthquake,
Before the rush and roar of oceans,
the tremors that shift mountains...
 "Step out of the traffic! Take a long,
loving look at me, your High God,
above politics, above everything."

In Eugene Peterson reflection on Psalm 46 he writes:

The second command is, "be still and know that I am God. BE STILL. Quit rushing through the streets long enough to become aware that there is more to life than your little self-help enterprises. When we are noisy and when we are hurried, we are incapable of intimacy ~ deep, complex, personal relationship. If God is the living center of redemption, it is essential that we be in touch with and responsive to that personal will. If God has a will for the world and we want to be in on it, we must be still long enough to find out what it is (for we certainly are not going to learn it by watching the evening news.) Baron von Hugel, who had a wise word on most subjects, always held out that "nothing was ever accomplished in a stampede."

Already this day is becoming something of a sweet surprise... don't let it bring you down, indeed!