Snow

It had been snowing off and on when I had gone to bed.  Earlier in the evening while I was on the phone with my niece, I sat and looked out the window at the falling flakes.  The snow was coming down ever so softly and I could see it in the street light in the middle of the parking lot. The flakes would fall and then some would catch a current and seem to dance and pirouette.  Then the next batch would fall slowly straight down only to be followed by more dancing flakes.  The show was mesmerizing.  But it was not yet cold enough for the flakes to remain once they had come in contact with the ground, so they would disappear into the wetness of the pavement.

I knew that once it got cold enough we would have a layer of snow on the ground, with that in mind I went to bed hoping for a white morning when I got up. Getting out of bed, the first thing I did was go and look out the window.  Sure enough, everything was covered in a layer of newly fallen snow. This is my fifth winter up here on the Rez, but I still get excited to see this world covered in snow.  It completely changes how everything looks.  What once was just dirt is now a fairyland of confectioners’ sugar, what is broken and ugly is hidden and what is beautiful is even more beautiful.

As I look at what is now beautiful, I think to myself, this is how we are supposed to look at one another, because this is how we are seen by our heavenly Father. Jesus’ grace comes and covers us with His Holiness. No longer is the ugly and broken seen, only the Son is seen.  We are promised in the Bible that when we believe Jesus is the Son of God and that He came to bring us new life and we confess that with our mouth that Jesus comes to dwell in us.  And not only that, but we are then in Christ and no longer in Adam and the world.  In other words, He is in us and we are in Him.  And there is nothing, nowhere, no how that can take that away from us because of His love.

Back to the snow picture, now we can look at someone and see them as being beautiful, there may be dirt and garbage and broken pieces under the snow, but what we are to look at is the beauty of God’s love for them; white and pure.  We are not to go digging in the snow to see what lies underneath, that is Holy Spirit’s job but we can be there for them when the winds of adversity try to blow away that covering.

I do not want to take the analogy too far as it will fall apart with too much scrutiny, but the fact remains, we are not to judge those around us, that whole splinter in their eye and log in ours thing, but to look at them with the eyes of love and compassion that can only be there because of Holy Spirit.