How To Have a White Christmas

God shook the snow globe yesterday. It fell hard and beautiful, and we watched with wide eyes and gave updates through the day. Look outside! It’s still snowing!

It’s called Schnee in Deutsch. As in Let’s go build a Schneemann. And Wanna’ have a Schneeball fight?

The snow falls through the night, and the globe keeps shaking through the morning commute. I watch in the dark from the bus stop. See the different trajectory each snowflake follows.

I get soaked on my way home, even from inside the hat and scarf and gloves and warm winter coat. But I’m walking, so I’m not that cold. The little tiny snowplow attacks the parking lot across the street. And the sandwich vendor on the corner’s shoveling hard when I pass by. Trying to keep up with the falling snow. Trying to stay ahead of it.

But nobody can keep up. The snow just keeps piling.

Huge snowflakes hit my eyelashes and my cheeks, and pieces of my hair are soaked, poking out from my hat. All I can think is how fast the snow falls. How nobody can get ahead of it.

Then it hits me, that verse I read at the beginning of Isaiah.

This piling snow, it’s grace from God. I cannot keep up with the clean forgiving He lavishes. My sins, oh how dark like scarlet they are. As red as the blood that flowed down Jesus’ face from His thorn-crown-covered forehead that Friday we call Good.

But His snow-piled grace turns them white even now. I walk in the snow and I am clean in my heart. New. Because He’s turned the dark red stains of the sin in my soul into snow-white piles of undeserved favor. Unmerited grace.

And this is the white of Christmas. I realize it as I traipse through the slush and into my building. The gift of the snow white clean for which Emmanuel arrived.

I don’t have to dream of a white Christmas. I live it every year.

But, it’s nice to have the snow piles outside to remind me.

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