Let it snow (with new pics)

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Last day of the Final Week in Ordinary Time 2025

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Let it snow

I, Daniel, found my spirit anguished within its covering of flesh,

and I was terrified by the visions of my mind.

I approached one of those present

and asked him what all this meant in truth.

A huge storm which began days ago hundreds of miles away in the Northwest is dumping inches of white snow on Urbana at this very moment. We cancelled plans to meet Chris’ family at Country Salvage, an Amish wholesale grocery a few miles west of Arcola. At this store cars vie for parking spots with black Amish carriages and their beautiful horses.

Before going in the store we would have drawn names, so that the six of us would each be shopping for our secret Santa friend. Last year I shopped for Aly, if I remember right, and found candy, crackers, small gifts, yogurt and summer sausage for her. We were allowed $20 for our gift buying. The prices at this wholesale store are often remarkably low.

We’d planned to have a buffet Christmas lunch at Yoder’s in Arthur afterward. Both the restaurant and the store are in the heart of Amish blacktop roads, and cars are expected to yield the right of way to carriages. At Yoder’s last year we sat around a table and ate Amish fried chicken and mashed potatoes and corn and green beans, then exchanged our purchases from Country Salvage.

Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy

from carousing and drunkenness

and the anxieties of daily life,

and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.

 

So we get to have a snow day, even if we’re not in school. We’ll very much miss the time together shopping and feasting, but I think all of us are also enjoying the snow falling, while we are NOT driving through it. Snow falls so silently and changes everything. I spent a couple of hours on Friday getting ready, blowing leaves off our walks, bringing a snowshovel, blower and boots inside, and moving the car to the end of our driveway, pointing out. We’re hoping to still head for Bloomington, 40 miles away, tomorrow for church with our friends on the first Sunday of Advent.The weather in Austin is rainy today, temperature around 75 degrees. Miles and Aki and their Grace Covenant mission team are headed home; they left Ecuador around midnight. We’ll take a bunch of pictures of the snow for them.

In the meantime, I found two poems to share with you.

The sun had come up brilliantly

after a heavy rain, and the trees

were glistening and very wet.

 

On some impulse,

plain exuberance, I suppose,

the fellow jumped up

and caught hold of a branch,

and a storm of luminous water

came pouring down on the two of them,

and they laughed and took off running,

the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress

as if she were a little bit disgusted,

but she wasn’t.

 

It was a beautiful thing to see,

like something from a myth.

 

I don’t know why I thought of that now,

except perhaps because it is easy

to believe in such moments

that water was made primarily

for blessing, and only secondarily

for growing vegetables

or doing the wash.

 

I wish I had paid more attention to it.

My list of regrets may seem unusual,

but who can know that they are, really.

 

This is an interesting planet.

It deserves all the attention

you can give it. – Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

And one more, written on the other side of this “interesting planet.” This one is written in the first person, from the point of view of God: 

Before they call I will answer,

while they are yet speaking I will hear.

                       —Isaiah 65.24

I hear you

My beloved,

you do not have to call out to me,

that I may hear you through clouds of distance,

across the great chasm of strangeness

between human and divine.

To me you do not call out, but in.

I am within you, in your deepest heart.

Within your joys and worries,

your strengths and wounds, I am there.

Your shouts of hope are my voice in you.

Your cries of despair, your pleas for grace,

are my longing in you.

Far beneath your understanding

there cries an unmet soul-hunger,

an unfinishedness like baby birds, beak up,

in the closed-in silence that finds no words,

but burns, heavy within you, yearning:

that is my spirit.

Your prayers give voice

to your hearing me hear you.

Beloved, before you love,

I am your Love.

Before you pray,

I am already your answer. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes

This being the last day of 2025’s season of Ordinary Time, I would like to thank you for hanging out with me on many of those 257 days. God bless you.

Be vigilant at all times and pray

That you may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.

(Daniel 7, Daniel 3, Luke 21)

posted at www.davesandel.net)

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