For many years, I’ve tried to make a habit of journaling at least briefly every day. Often as I’m reading Scriptures or devotionals, I have interesting thoughts and questions come to mind. I imagine that I’ve even asked God questions that no one else has ever thought about! Recently, I was reading through some old journals and came across a meditation that the Lord had given me nearly 40 years ago in the midst of a very dark time in my life.

The location was a beautiful park in the city where we lived that had a river running through it and walking trails several miles long. Because it was so peaceful, I often went to walk and pray. I was sitting in the car reading and praying one beautiful winter morning, just watching one of those snowfalls where giant flakes mesmerize you as they gently fall to the earth. There, in that quiet time and place, the Lord began to speak into my heart. Allow me to share my journal with you…

“Today as I sit at the park watching a beautiful snowfall, it occurs to me that sometimes our lives are like a winter landscape – dead and bare with only a few dead leaves hanging on as reminders of a better season. And yet, there is a special beauty about it — the quiet, the stillness, the sense of everything having come to a stop for a time. The peace and lack of activity present here during the other seasons is overwhelming. God has put everything to rest for a time and in the stillness is doing a new creative work which will burst forth at the proper time in the Spring. All the beauty and energy and fruitfulness and life of the past seasons has been buried under a pure white blanket of snow. None of the scars left by the traffic of the summer remain.

The snow, which continues to fall, covers, protects, seals, waters, and restores all that will bring forth life and beauty in the seasons to come. Without this time of rest and repair, the park would die. The flowers and grass and trees would continually pour their strength into what is visible outwardly to the human eye. They would continually be trampled and picked and vandalized by the unthinking people who never cease to come to this place to “take advantage” of the beauty – never stopping to see where the source is.

It seems as though God brings the winter to stop the drain on His creation. Everything here has a time to sleep and catch its breath and restore and replenish the internal places not seen with the human eye. And so it is that the park is once again ready to offer beauty and comfort and solitude to those who seek it in the new season, as well as to those who come only to take advantage of it.