December 20 - Winter!

Winter! Some do not like it much, but endure it. Others go away from it to warmer climates and sojourn among palm trees and on sandy beaches warmed by a golden sun. Followers of perennial summer and devotees of higher temperatures, they have long since lost acquaintance with winter’s rugged delights.

But some of us are devoted lovers of the four seasons. Having lived among them for so long, the changing of the seasons is our inherited life-style. And while, now and then, we grumble at the ice and snow, we really don't mind winter all that much and, believe it or not, we like it most of the time.

A summer night in June or July can be of entrancing beauty and charm, but the same may be said of many a Winter evening in December or January. It is a time of snow crunching underfoot, the night clear and cold, brilliant stars in the sky, moonlight so bright it rivals noonday. The glorious colors of warmer areas are beautiful beyond the ability to describe them, especially when one tries to convey the exotic fragrances of tropical or semitropical flowers. But then, black and white can be beautiful, too, either separately or in combination.

Only recently, returning from a winter afternoon’s walk on our farm on Quaker Hill, Ruth and I simultaneously stopped, arrested by the beauty of the scene before us. Our house atop a hill stood etched in white against a blue sky, its stately Corinthian columns gleaming in the early setting of the sun in the west. Snow lay deep upon the ground, festooned on bushes and trees.

The long white fences ran off into the distance, lined by gigantic maples, stark and black against the white-clad hills. Long shafts of golden sunlight lay across the snow-covered lawns as the winter evening came down cold and stern. This beauty was of black and white to which gold was added. Ruth enthusiastically agreed when I exclaimed, “In its own glorious way, this just has to be as beautiful as that lovely southland.” “Yes,” she replied, “but isn't all of God’s great world beautiful, north or south or wherever?”

Winter silences have their meaningful appeal to the reflective mind. Gliding cross-country on skis into a lonely grove of trees, then standing still and quiet until the palpable silence makes itself felt is, in a deep sense, to be at one with the essence of life. I have been alone in the same grove of trees in midsummer, but nature is not so silent then—for aliveness is all around. In winter, nature’s utter and incredible stillness steals upon one, though at either time the healing of her gentle touch is felt. But whether it is the tentative change of nature’s spring-time, or the fullness of her summer, or the flaming glory of autumn, or finally, the disciplinary cold of winter, the good God made them all for us.