White Outs, Blizzards, and Snow Packs

Appreciating the Spring--------------
The Red Bud trees are starting to bloom now and the Dogwoods will not be far behind. We are beginning to back off on the amount of hay the cattle are being fed and soon they will turn up their noses at the dry brown hay in favor of the juicy green shoots beginning to cover the hillside pasture to the right of Kennedy Lane. The Yoshima Cherries are turning their radiant pink and white is emerging on every Bradford Pear. Soon all of us who still cut our own lawn will be checking to see if the blade on the lawnmower needs sharpening and that the engine will still start. Unlike the days when lawn mowing was something I did after work or in the precious few hour away from work on Saturdays, I now look forward to the yard work and the feeling of accomplishment it gives me when I finish a day of making the place look “shipshape.”
I love the warm weather, for I have a tremendous basis of comparison with life in the great white frozen north when winter set in about the beginning of November and lasted until nearly June. When the brown eyed girl and I lived in Grand Rapids Michigan, the annual snowfall often hovered around 75 inches but in some years was double that amount. I remember that in one particularly rough winter the snowfall nearly doubled the average and a whopping 20 inches fell in a single January storm which lasted little more than 24 hours. My family had not yet moved to Grand Rapids and I was a more or less permanent resident of the local Holiday Inn when the big blizzard of 78 came to Michigan. I woke up that morning to a 20 inch snowfall and 21 degrees below zero. As I was seriously debating with myself on the wisdom of accepting this assignment, I was also wondering if the little 1976 Vega I was driving would, by some miracle, start. It did not, but the Plant Protection people came out to pick me up in a four wheel drive Suburban.
I also remember my two little children hiding Easter eggs in the snow that year and the worry of the community centered around the fact that several of our school children had been injured by sliding off snow banks in front of oncoming cars while waiting for the school bus. One could scarcely tell where in the community you were located since it was difficult to find even a single landmark not covered by snow. Many careful drivers had placed tall bike poles with orange flags on the front bumper of their cars so others drivers would be able to know their whereabouts at four way intersections, since seeing over the snow banks was impossible. It was not uncommon to see neighbors on flatter roof surfaces with their snow blowers reducing the weight load on the rafters, or to see collapsed roofs on outbuilding that had not had that level of care.
Less common, but occurring on several occasions were “white outs,” where it became impossible to see out of the windows of your home or office because blowing snow whipping through the air completely obliterated the field of vision or where seeing even the hood of one’s own car became impossible.
Roads were attached by massive trucks with snow plows higher than my head, but even so main north/south arteries such as the 131 freeway sometimes ground to a halt as drifting and blowing snow packed underpasses with snow from pavement to the girders of the bridge overhead. Massive broken back front end loaders had to be trucked in and the snow loaded into tandem gravel haulers and trucked to the Grand River and dumped.
The winters we spent in Cleveland Ohio were scarcely better than the ones in Grand Rapids, and if I really want to remember what it is like to be cold, I simply remember back to the winter I spent in Korea with the Siberian wind swooping down and blowing through the Quonset huts in which we lived.
Yes, I know how to appreciate the spring and how to appreciate the mild weather of Middle Tennessee, even in colder winters like this one in 2009 and 2010, because I have seen how tough the winter is capable of being and what it is like to go days upon end without seeing a ray of sunshine and weeks upon weeks when the mercury never went above freezing, sometimes staying below zero for days at a time.
It has always seemed to me that folks who have faced lives filled with brokenness and hardship are, in the same way, more able to appreciate God’s Grace, having experience the terrible emptiness of life without Him, that those of us who were raised in more religious environments did not encounter. They are able to sing with a special conviction in their voice, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
I suppose the irony of it all is that each of us was just as lost, and just as blind, but we are unable to see the contrast as clearly. It seems that just as Ma Ma Maberry often said, “Ever cloud has a silver lining” for I sometime envy them their sharpness of focus on God’s Saving Grace.
May you experience God’s Saving Grace in a special way and be able to clearly focus on its impact in your life.
Bob