The arctic air is bitter and bracing against the skin, causing it to respond with tautness and corresponding sharp aching pain on your face. It is hard to breathe deeply, as the air seems to have thickened and become a bit frozen in the cold. As you gaze out the window, snow might be falling softly in a blanketing gentleness, but the uncomfortable realization is ever present of the harshness of the temperature on the other side of the glass. Your thoughts wander to a place of processing in your mind, if it could be possible to have the beauty of the winter season without the freezing. Somehow, your eyes catch the color from the early morning sunlight in a sparkling design etched in the corner of the window by the frost creating an intricate and amazing portrait of God’s perfect artistic craftsmanship. Here in this moment as you shiver a bit, you discover something quite stunning in these tiny lines of crystalized moisture, there is beauty breaking out in the unseen.
Even as the cold seems to penetrate into your senses, a deeper penetrating question arises in your contemplating mind… there are gifts by God’s design even in this winter season. The staggering reality of the cold usually wins the battle of our focus but we must see beyond to the gifts of God woven into this season. It is an incredible truth, that every snow flake is a unique ice crystal. Every one, amazingly created by the natural world God created. Every line in a frosty portrait on a window, it is spun and woven midst the interactions and reactions of warmth and cold temperatures to paint a masterpiece, impossible to duplicate. Without the winter season, snow and frost cannot come. If God, so tenderly designed the winter season in nature, we must realize, He infinitely is with us, in any winter season in our lives. There might be a cold penetrating harshness, in what is outside the window of the current moment we are facing in our lives but those current circumstances, heartaches and conditions; do not mean, God is not near or attentive in the beauty of the unseen. His love endures forever and His faithfulness has not left us.
God is speaking in the falling of the snow and by His breath the frost creates perfect and beautiful designs. If we change our focus from the cold temperature around us, to the warmth of His love … we will see His marvelous ways and beauty in what was unseen. (Devotional Thoughts from Job 37:5-12)