We woke this morning to one of the coldest days in a decade.  But it is one of those days that have a glory to them that is rare: the irony of our nearest star blazing in unimaginable heat but leaving sparkling diamonds of frost to refract its rays untouched by its warmth.  The crystal-filled air is beginning to build a sun pillar—a shaft of gold rising from the upper arch of our star into the sky like a column in God’s house. [Click on a photo to see a larger version. Then hit the return arrow.]

The birds have yet to move from their cover, intimidated by the intense cold—and our resident goshawk, which has been thinning the flock one by one nearly every day.  Frost and dusty snow on the Austrian pines that line our drive make it hard to believe that the tight-closed male cones will in four months be dusting the new female cones with yellow pollen to begin a new season of growth.

The crabapple trees are hanging their preserves out in the clear air as the primary survival food for snowbound birds that normally eat seeds and insects.  Goldfinches in their drab winter garb and chickadees have been feeding together in one copse of crabapples the past couple days while cedar waxwings and starlings mob other trees nearby.

Last summer’s robin’s nest wears a giant cap of snow—making it easy to understand why robins go south for the winter.  Yet even the robins will return well before spring and flock to these same crabapples for food before the soil thaws and delivers the worm protein they need for nesting.

Another phenomenon of subzero weather in urban areas is storm drains acting a bit like volcanic fumaroles, spewing out vaporous subterranean warmth into the chill air, giving us Michiganders the closest thing we will ever see to the vents of the Yellowstone caldera.

While such cold can indeed be life threatening if you are not careful, it does create a unique sort of beauty that George MacDonald captured in words over a hundred years ago in his Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood:

I walked home one winter’s Sunday morning after church.  It was a lovely day.  The sun shone so warm that you could not help thinking of what God would be able to do before long: draw primroses and buttercups out of the earth by force of sweet persuasive influences.  But in the shadows lay fine fine webs of ice, so delicately lovely that one could not but be glad of the cold that made the water able to please itself by taking such graceful forms.

And I wondered over again, for the hundredth time, what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful.  The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought.  Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what He wants us to be, so holy, therefore His works declare Him in beauty; His fingers can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness; and even the play of His elements is in grace and tenderness of form.

And then I thought how the sun, ar the farthest point from us, had begun to come back toward us, looked upon us with a hopeful smile, and was like the Lord when He visited his people as a little one of themselves, to grow upon the earth until it should blossom as the rose in the light of His presence.

See you outdoors!

Dean