The Snowless Days Before Lent

We moved from Mississippi to Connecticut in early March of 2010. There was still snow on the ground when we arrived, but only those matted crusts of late winter, grey from the fallen exhaust of passing cars and broken asphalt thrown aside by snowplows. Spring came earlyish that year, and it was a good ten months before we experienced our first real New England winter.

It was a slobberknocker of a winter, too. Snows started the day after Christmas and didn’t stop for months. The snow was so high that our kids, aged seven on down, couldn’t go outside to play, as the snow was literally over their delicate Mississippi magnolia heads. Ken eventually gave up trying to clear out the entire mailbox, and just made a tunnel in the snow for the mailman to reach in and deposit things into a dark, strange mail cave. It was absolutely wild and beautiful, though I cannot believe how much snow we shoveled by hand that year.

It looks photoshopped, but this was actually our reality

Winters since have rarely been as dramatic, though they’ve always brought their glorious blankets of snow. Each winter here, I’ve marveled at the miraculous powers of snowfall to make even the most stubbornly ugly part of my yard look serene and mystic. There may be a pile of soggy recycling still lingering from Thanksgiving, but under a fresh snow, it’s transformed into a cozy little slope that eventually gets criss crossed with the lacy footprints of mice.

This year it’s all been different, though. On the heels of one of the driest summers on record, we’re now firmly in the middle of a snowless winter. Our temperatures have lurched up and down the thermometer like a drunken sailor, veering from windchills of -33 up to balmy days of low 60s, all within two weeks. When it’s cold, it’s dry, and when the clouds open forth, they dump inches and inches of rain. I look out my window every morning to fields that are grey and brown and scarred with muddy trenches and last fall’s debris on full display. There’s no snowfall hiding the work I shirked at the end of last growing season; there’s no blanket of white allowing me to ignore the amounts of the work I’m going to have to put in at the start of this one.

I’ve spent all winter irritated by this snowless turn of events. And when I’m not irritated by the weather, I’m unsettled by it. It feels somehow personal, a specific thing God is saying to me, and to be honest, my response has not been super enthusiastic.

Lent is a little over a week away, and I’ve been praying and meditating on how our good King is inviting me to follow Him through it. What trail to the Cross has He marked out for me this year? What am I being asked to take with me on the journey, and what am I asked to leave behind?

In years past, during seasons of life when the children were very little, or money was very tight, or illness or calamity were frequent visitors, the Lenten path Christ invited me to travel was like a snowy New England winter. There was much buried under a blanket of white, tasks and problems that needed to be addressed, but at that moment, all I was asked to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other. What laid beneath could wait, in those seasons.

But now, every morning when I look across my snowless fields, everything feels different. In the voice I imagine God speaks to me, or maybe better to say that the voice I understand God speaking to me, nature always writes large things my soul needs to hear. And what I’m hearing now is that this is a year to take a deep breath and let Christ lead me through things I’ve been happy to remain covered. I do not have a joyful heart about this prospect. I have always been a prideful, high-strung person with trust issues. I am stubborn and cling to any number of ignorant, yet boisterous opinions. The notion of wading through the mud and dead things in my own soul- even with Christ right by my side- is not one that is met with eager rolling up of ye olde shirtsleeves.

This morning, however, while engaging in my morning doom scrolling, I came across a meme that felt just like a knife in my heart.

The picture was posted in response to some Superbowl commercials about Jesus, and so it triggered the expected reactions from the expected people. That part doesn’t bother me. The part that hurt was knowing that I have been guilty of exactly what this reductionist meme accuses Christians of. I have allowed myself to view my brothers and sisters who hold different values as I do as strangers, as enemies, as objects beneath my lofty intellect and compassion. I do it every time I hate read certain Instagram accounts. I do it every time I let politics divide more than I allow Christ to unite. It hasn’t been snow, gently covering trash piles in my soul- it’s been arrogance and pride.

I struggle, like many, I suppose, finding loving responses to those who hold values that I understand to be gravely evil. I know that Christ ate with the tax collectors and harlots, but He did so while calling them conversion. What I keep circling back to, over and over again, is what does that look like for me, a regular person in a regular life, dwelling in a land where disagreeing with another is seen as “literal violence”. How do I welcome and love while also unflinchingly inviting to conversion?

Sensing that these are some of the trash piles Christ is inviting me to clear out this Lent, I worry that I won’t be able to keep up with our King on this hard path. I know these trails have to be walked down, that the debris must cleared out of the way, but I doubt my resolve. Yet I look out over my fields, uncovered and naked beneath the snowless skies, and I sense the urgency of needed change. I can see the outline of our beloved King, standing at the edge of my woods, beckoning me to follow.

I know He’s led me faithfully through the snows. Now to take the deep breath and trust that He won’t lose me among the mud of my own brokenness.