Beneath the Snow

Author: Mark Fenstermacher
January 28, 2022

Heading west, I not only kept my eyes on the road as the sun sank beneath the trees to the south, but I kept noticing the outside temperature reading on the dashboard of my car. When I began the trip, it was 11 above zero. Then, a half hour later, it was 7 degrees. In the half-light after sunset, the temperature dipped to 4 degrees, then 2 degrees, then 0, and then dropped all the way down to 7 below zero.

The car was warm but the world outside was frozen. Smoke coming out of chimneys didn’t rise far into the night air, but—as if hitting an invisible ceiling—made an abrupt right turn and floated along parallel to the ground. When I stopped at a grocery store, the car creaked as I opened the door and the snow beneath my feet crunched as I walked across the lot.

I share that moment with you because, earlier in the day, I had sent a text to a friend going through deep pain. In the text I quoted the line from the Hymn of Promise: "In the cold and snow of winter there's a spring that waits to be, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see."

Those words, written by Natalie Sleeth, remind us that even when life is hard, even when the ground is frozen as solid as steel, even when our hearts are as blue as the January night sky, the ground is getting ready for a new season…a growing season. Navigating these times, letting God do something new and green in us, isn’t about gritting our teeth and simply waiting for the seasons to change, but it is about opening our hearts, minds, and souls in an intentional way to Christ.

Resurrection isn’t an automatic thing. Some people, in the cold and snow of winter, in the middle of their depression or failure, decide to let this become—like the winter in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia—become a permanent thing. You may know people like that. They are as stuck in the pain of the past as a car deep in icy snow.

Others, somehow, find the courage to seek God and let the Holy Spirit work to move them towards spring. Fields tend not to bear fruit unless the ground is broken up, and so it is with us: the freezing and thawing of life has a way of opening us up so something new can grow.

There are other things I could say on this winter evening, but simply let me say this.

If your heart and world seem frozen, you are not alone. We are all, at one time or another, in that very place.

If your heart and world seem frozen, you are not alone. God is with you. And, if you look around, there are probably angels (who look like ordinary people) who will help you make it through the dark. You are not alone and you are loved.

If your heart and world seem frozen, beneath the snow life is stirring.

In Romans 4:20, Paul reminds us that Abraham “never wavered in believing God’s promise.”  In 6:3, the apostle goes on to say: “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they are good for us - they help us learn to endure. And endurance develops strength of character in us, and character strengthens our confident expectations of salvation. And this expectation will not disappoint us.”

Beneath the snow, God is at work.

Beneath the snow, spring is on the way.

Grace and peace,
Pastor Mark

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Please keep our leadership team in your prayers as we begin a new year. One of our goals this year is to continue to grow together as a team, with our various committees and teams working together as a unified whole. Our leaders will be using the Upper Room resources DISCIPLINES so that we are praying the same prayers and reading the same Bible texts daily. Great and good things are ahead of us at First UMC.

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