White As Snow

When I sat down to blog earlier this week, I was inspired to write about the snow.  Everyone in my house was in bed.  I opened the front door and stepped outside on the covered porch of our house.  I delighted in the glistening sight of snow blanketing the neighborhood.  It was peacefully quiet—no, more than that, it was totally silent.  The land had been kissed by God and hushed into a remarkable silence. 

I took in a deep breath of the cool fresh night air.  It was invigorating.  Although the temperature was below freezing, in this brief moment of time I didn’t notice the cold.  I could feel His presence in the silence and in the beauty of the snow kissed landscape.  The scripture that immediately came to mind was from Isaiah 1:18, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” 

I sat down with my computer and started to write—fully intending to blog about this vivid scene.  But somewhere in my ADD brain, my writing headed elsewhere and I fell asleep before finishing.  Then the ‘snowmageddon’ events of the next few days interfered with any hopes of finishing that blog.  Now in the midst of the slush of bloody hell (a phrase coined by my husband), I can more clearly see where God wanted me to go with this.

The next morning I woke up to the sound of freezing rain tapping on the skylight in our master bathroom.  One hour later the power went out!  As 22-year residents of the Seattle area, we were used to this drill.  We managed to stay warm with a fire and cook on the outdoor gas grill.  Dinner and games by candlelight were also on the agenda. 

That night I again went outside to take in the beauty of the snow.  The scene was dramatically different though.  Instead of glistening white snow, there was darkness.  The snow was still blanketing the ground, but with no street lights or house lights to illuminate it, the neighborhood was eerily dark.  The silence was also gone.  It was replaced by the buzzing of nearby generators.

The next day was the first time I ventured out in the snow.  At this point it wasn’t fluffy white snow though.  It was heavy, wet, ice crusted snow.  It was slippery, crunchy, uneven and dirty.  There was no more beauty in it.  It became an unwelcome reminder of the lost days and lost work. 

So what started out as ‘white as snow’ really did seem to revert back to that ‘red as crimson’ classification.  Some of the snow melted, some of it became hard and some of it became dirty—not unlike our lives.  God wants us to know that He sees us as white as snow.  He wants us to know that even though we may feel dirty or crushed and ‘red as crimson’, that is not what we are. 

As I reflect on the snow of the week, I can definitely see where Satan tried to thwart any enjoyment of it.  He wanted us to isolate.  He wanted us to become frustrated by our circumstances.  He didn’t want the light to shine through.  He wanted the darkness to rule. 

In Isaiah 1:18, God used the analogy of comparing our sins to being white as snow to represent our purity in His sight.  Our challenge is to choose to believe it, no matter what the circumstances.