It Will Melt

It always does

It’s been snowing here in Denver and I can’t help but see a metaphor.  It’s a hazard of this work that everything becomes a stand in for something else.  A backpack becomes a lesson in how we hold our problems.  A pear becomes an invitation to taste life more fully.  Nothing is safe from being recast with meaning it didn’t ask for.    

And now it’s the snow.  We woke to it the day after the election and it has continued falling more or less steadily for three days.  A wet, heavy snow that looked fresh and promising at first, but now just feels soggy and oppressive.  Boughs are bent.  Limbs are broken.  It feels like it will always be this way.

And so this morning, if you woke with your spirit bent over, or if your heart is broken…by this election…or the state of the world…or any number of problems you might be facing personally, as trite as it feels to say this, I want to remind you (and me): that snow always melts.    

We take this for granted, like we do so many things.  But can you imagine a world where it didn’t melt.  A world where we had to keep piling it up on the sides of the driveway.  Year after year watching it grow higher.  Those who could, would pay snow trucks to come and carry it away like our garbage, to make even larger piles somewhere else.  It would be awful…if snow didn’t melt. 

But it does. It always does.

The forecast for the next few days is sunny and in the 50’s (gotta love Colorado).  Which means that almost imperceptibly, ever so slowly, that foot of snow out there, one day soon will be there no more. Which is not to say there won’t be damage.  There will be much to repair and there will be things that can’t be repaired.  But the snow will melt.

And not only that, but by the wondrous alchemy of nature, the very thing that caused the boughs to bend in the first place will be transformed into something we need.  Something life-giving.   

Could it be?  Could it be that hidden in the weight of our suffering lie the seeds of the very things we need most? Or is this stretching the metaphor too far?

I would say it is, except that too many times as a pastor I saw it happen…witnessed some terrible situation be transformed by grace into some thing of beauty.  I saw it so often that I’ve come to believe it happens every time. Maybe not right away.  Maybe not even in this lifetime.  But I now hold it as a theological tenet, a truth I cleave to in my heart…that the snow always melts.  And from it always comes new life. 

Looking out my kitchen window now, it doesn’t seem possible.  The snow covers everything.  All of it just so heavy.  But the truth is it is passing already.  The transformation has already begun.