Vicar's Blog -See amid the winter snow by Colin Such
Posted 12/7/2016 5:22:46 PM
Will we have a white Christmas this year? To be honest I’d rather have a frosty morning than snow so we get all the Christmas card beauty without any of the hassle of trying to get through snow and slush.
I honestly can’t remember now whether I’ve ever had a snowy Christmas day or not, certainly I remember childhood years of playing in the snow, building snow forts, making snowmen, walking through snow drifts to school, snow ball fights and making ice slides in the playground (the wall of the school building providing the braking mechanism!) but whether we ever had snow on Christmas Day itself I cannot now remember.
What I do know is that one of my favourite Christmas carols is “See amid the winter snow” and that I usually hum this to myself to and from church in the early hours of Christmas Day while everyone else is still fast asleep. In the last few days another carol I find myself humming as I walk round the Lime Pits with Bartleby is “In the bleak midwinter”; as we circumnavigate the lake the phrase “earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone” automatically comes into my mind.
The world just looks so beautiful on a frosty morning; the air crisp and clear, a light mist rising from the ground and the lake as the sun begins to warm the world, the birds and squirrels rustling in the trees and the light white frosty covering transforming the world I see every day into something new.
Christmas Day is in reality just another day like any other and yet it is transformed into something beautiful, magical and wonderful. My walk around the Lime pits takes the same route every day but it too is transformed by the frost into something different – a wonderful and beautiful experience. These things remind me that Christ comes into the world as it is, a world with the traffic jam on a Monday morning (and every morning) a world with daily work to be done at work and in the house, a world with difficult problems in many countries including our own – and yet a world that is transformed into something beautiful if we allow him to be born in our hearts and souls and allow him to live through us into our daily lives.