This morning I awoke earlier than usual and came downstairs to a picturesque,  perfectly illustrated winter scene.  Yesterday’s snowfall blanketed the world outside my windows in white. A few animal and dog tracks broke up the snowy expanses, but even the ruts from our car were softly rounded.

It was not full light yet. The sun was up but playing with the clouds. Like an old photograph, the monochromatic landscape  was a  stark contrast of black and white.  Snow mounds outlined the tall, skeletal limbs of trees, filled in empty spaces between them, smoothed out the ground, silenced the noise.  The morning was untouched and beautiful. In the semi  darkness, I stood with my coffee cup, my heart enticed to linger on admiring God’s handiwork. “What God hath wrought,” I thought silently. It is so beautiful here. I felt a surge of gratitude for God’s blessing to me and Dan in this place.

Then the sun broke through the clouds like  a brilliant eye peering through upper   branches of the  Pondersoa pine shading our deck. The sun light hit the snow everywhere and magnified each ice crystal a thousand times. The snow-laden trees caught fire . Light avalanched down from the top of the ridge onto the driveway, into the gardens,  around the shrubs. It shone so blindingly I had to turn away and avert my eyes.It  shimmered   and flashed like a mirror.   If earlier I’d admired   God’s blue iced Hands at work in the night, I was now speechless.   It was an exquisite moment and words failed me. When God breaks through at such unexpected times,  there are no words. We say   awesome, magnificent, breath taking, stupendous and even glorious but such words are pale.  What rises in the heart is far beyond ordinary language. Nothing suffices or satisfies. Looking out my window, I  saw  what God had wrought, but  sensed the  Presence of Him  who had wrought.

A few moments later clouds passed in front of the sun again. Immediately the fiery light was gone. Snow was white again, the tall trees stark  and dark in contrast. I felt a little disappointed. I’d been  smitten by  the same scene earlier and it was no less beautiful now. But something had come and gone and had changed in the   landscape. I’d seen the effect of light on the snow and how it changed everything.  The first was beautiful in its white-black starkness.  The second was indescribable.   I’d seen the possibility of light breaking through. It is an “intimation of immortality”  such as the poet Wordsworth expressed :

“The sunshine is a glorious birth But yet I know, where’er I go/That there hath passed away a glory from the earth”  Wiliam Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality”

One day, we’ll know a glory we can only glimpse at now. Just as I could not  look directly into sun light on snow for fear of snow blindness,  God’s glory is hidden from us. The Word tells believers we see only in part now but there will be a different time. While now…

we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Cor 13: 12

What splendid surprises await us! God promises us an eternal  life more breath taking than   November mornings  after a snowfall.

… what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” — the things God has prepared for those who love him. 1 Corinthians 2:9

Face to face with Christ we will know Him and be known by Him. There will be no more sun because Jesus is the bright and shining Morning Star.  There will be no more snow nor ice, nor heat nor cold. Pain and tears will be gone. Our eyes and ears will be opened to  unspeakable delights and indescribable,  overflowing  joy . Then, as the song asks, “ Will I be  able to speak at all? ”  Perhaps only without words.

Friede