This morning, when I went outside to take Hazel on her morning walk, I was greeted with the beauty of snow sparkling on the ground and falling from the sky. I confess that the little boy in me still loves the first snow of the year. And ever since I read the following passage from Buechner a few years ago, it has come to mind that first time each year that I open the door to the wonder of snow:

You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there--the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.

Frederick Buechner, "The Gospel as Fairy Tale"

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?