From N. D. Wilson's Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl

"God never seems capable of moderation or of understanding the basic concepts behind supply and demand. He constantly devalues His own products. Give me one [snowflake], a cool room, and a magnifying glass and I will admire its artistry.  But right now, I’m sitting by my window on a Christmas night, staring out at winter wastefulness in the extreme. Miles of clouds, clouds larger than states, have turned into crystal stars and now streak silently past my window to their deaths.  . . .

Try counting the flakes. Really count them. I’ll step back outside for a quick estimate. Let’s be conservative. Assuming that we’re in the middle of this storm and it only stretches ten miles in each direction (Ha, says the weather man), and assuming that the storm is a tiny one hundred feet tall, and skipping the preexisting ground accumulation, and eyeball estimating the frenzied blizzard’s air content at a meager ten flakes per cubic foot, then we are looking at about . . . 11,151,360,000,000 flakes in the air above a small patch in Idaho at one particular moment on Christmas night at the end of the year 2007. Just this storm, this tiny little slice of winter could divvy out seventeen hundred flakes to every person on this planet. More impressively, that number has the US national debt beat by trillions.

I look out my window at the proud Christmas tumble. Ye flakes, do you care what I think? Hearken to my insults: You’re totally devalued—like stars and galaxies and insect species. For all your balance and your beauty and your impossible symmetry, you’re each not even worth a buck. Or a cent. If I could get a penny for each of you, then I’d make the Forbes rich-people list (somewhere below the Wal-Mart heirs).

We all know that each flake is different and unique, because we’ve all been to preschool. Each one is beautiful, yeah, yeah, we know that too. But how can we possibly value these things when their maker slings them around like so much trash? Actually, I’ve never seen anyone sling this much trash. Doesn’t He realize that people will curse this tomorrow? That they’ll shovel it and salt it and SUV it into gray slop? Does He know that my daughters are going to roll in it, melting thousands of flakes with their flushed cheeks and tens of thousands with their tongues?