Reflections on a Winter's Morning

As I sit typing this morning the wind is whipping across the chimney and howling down through the fireplace.  If I go and stand outside the front door the trees are bending with the force of the front as it blows in.  The ground, which betrayed nothing but the appearance of summer yesterday, is now damp from the unheard rain that fell sometimes in the night.  After a brief foray back into the Autumn that never seems to be long enough we have careened directly into Winter.

The cold is the thing I like the least.  I can certainly deal with rain.  I can even deal with the wind (although we never had a great deal like this where I came from).  The one thing that I cannot wrap my head around is cold - not just the cold of winter, but the cold that cracks your fingers and makes sure that you are never really that warm, the sort of days you wish you had the covering of snow to at least make the cold worth it.

But these are some of the best days to be inside watching.  The trees dance in the wind here unlike anything I have seen before in my life:  not the gentle swaying of the pines at the Ranch as the wind blows over the Sierras nor the majesty of the Redwoods of my college days where the trees are so large and tall that they do not seem to move at all.  The oaks and cedars here flail back and forth as if shaken by a rather large hand, standing where the larger trees would probably break

It is a privilege - and one I do not feel grateful for often enough - that I have had the opportunity to live in some many places so that I can see and experience such things.  That I can look at trees and know that they do not behave the same way other places.  That the wind roars down here from Canada where in other places I have lived it roared from over the ocean.  They both roar and they both bring rain - but how differently they do so.

How wonderful - and suprisingly different while being the same - is God's creation.