Predestination

When I was five my teacher explained to me one of nature’s most wondrous secrets: two snowflakes can never be the same.

And at age twenty four I find myself in that same awe as I stare at the google search results of microscopic snowflakes.

And now I with an almost supernatural eye

can tell that these crystals

are fearfully and wonderfully formed. Two cannot be the same.

They are temples: individually hand-crafted to be created in the image of something beautiful, something perfect, something more than those paper-thin constructions on fogged-up window panes.

They are delicate

yet, in their design they are determined with purpose to fall and to fall directly and rapidly from heaven to earth in accordance to His will. He says to some, “Cover the roofs of the houses” and to others, “Blanket the pines in thick, white sheets.” And so they do just that. All of them. And gracefully, too.

But what about the snow that falls in front of my house near the street?

The sooted snow on the side of the road might fall the same way but

never ends too gracefully.

It puddles along curbs

and cries its way to the sewer

or freezes into hills,

not the kind for sledding but the black kind:

a carbon monoxide skating rink for car exhaust.

No, the snow never melts too gracefully by the side of the road

and chances are

it never expected to end

so dishonorably,

so heavily laden with dirt and gravel,

despised by commuters blaring horns in 7am traffic,

compressed into this mess of what could have been beautiful and pure.

I’d like to think

that this curbside snow doesn’t end there or that at least it didn’t fall to the street in obedience to the Wind.

But I believe

that in God’s merciful and just design of natural law that each snowflake in its individuality is not the victim to some sort of partiality but is a participant in something greater than all of this.

And how I pray

that each creation would experience glorious restoration in Christ and that each would be transformed as white as was planned in the beginning.

And I know

that while I stand here sometimes frozen in my tunnel-vision understanding of His eternal plan that God saving me, a fallen road-side creation, is simply a declaration of His glory.