A Prayer from the Winter
There is a beautiful, pristine, white layer of snow covering the ground, trees, roofs, every surface. You’ve sent us a lovely winter gift, though I know that it can be hardship for some.
Still, it is beautiful to look at — a sort of purity, an unsoiled and unspoiled scene. Until, that is, I look out onto the busy street in from of my house. There, Lord, I see what we make of this pristine purity by our passage through it. We try to control it and manipulate it with our great, three-bladed snow plows. We try to melt it out of existence with our unnatural salty spread. Our dirty round treads roll across the plowed surfaces and turn them into gray-brown gashes across the city– slicing and re-slicing the ground into a dirty grid.
I remember, Lord, in Tolkien’s books, the elves could walk along on the surface of the snow without breaking through, without disrupting or corrupting its unmarred purity. They possess a oneness with the natural
order and move through it without debasing it.
We heavy, fallen, sin-sick human beings can’t do that. Our relation to the rest of the created order is as opponents, antagonists. You told us it would be this way. (Genesis 3:17, 18)
It seems to me, Lord, that I go through my life making dirty gray-brown trails through my life. Nevertheless, in Jesus you make them pure and clean and undefiled again. I do long for the time when I like Jesus will walk on the surface of purity and not corrupt it, not debase it.
Till then I cling to Jesus. Even then I will still cling to him because even then my uncorrupting walking will still be in, on, through, by Jesus.
© 2010 Gary A. Chorpenning
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