Winter branches, snow and God's love

By Mia Pohlman

It took a long time for it to get around to snowing this winter. We got snow briefly for a day or so in November, and then nothing. For two months, the trees have sat brown, the sky has alternated between gray and sunny days, and the grass in many places has slowly turned to pale yellow and brown-green, but no snow. It can look barren and bleak.

There is something beautiful, though, about way the trees stand as they are in wintertime. They are stripped down, without fullness. They are quiet, patient. It is a season about being.

And then, it snows. The bleakness of the trees provides a way for us to see the beauty of the snow. The wonder of snow wouldn't be as easily seen if there were leaves on the trees and everything was green. The starkness of the uncovered limbs provides a framework for the snow to show us the outlines of the trunk and limbs, to help us understand them.

I think sometimes when our lives look bleak like winter trees, it can be easy to give in to the temptation of believing God is withholding his love from us. But God does not withhold his love from us. We can see it in the way the snow comes to show the beauty in the barrenness, or in the way springtime comes again to bring the fullness of green leaves back to the trees.

The psalmist also assures us of it in Psalm 66:20 (NAB): "Blessed be God who did not reject my prayer nor withhold his love from me." Like the snow that waited this year to come, when life looks bleak, perhaps the conditions for a "wow" moment of understanding and beauty just aren't right yet.

I recently rediscovered a series of talks Father Bill Kottenstette gave at a parish mission, and I've been listening to them. In one, he says this: "Sometimes, the only answer we get to our questions is wait. Hold it. Don't demand an answer. Don't demand that you know something. ... The answer's going to come in its time, and I have to stand and bear the tension. ... Most of the time when the minute's over, we don't even know because the problem has somehow not been resolved or answered, but doesn't exist as a problem anymore. We've moved past it."

I love these ideas, of standing like winter trees and waiting for the snow, waiting for the leaves, living and being as we are and trusting in the moment and its purpose, even if we can't yet see it.

In the fifth part of the poem "Shores of Silence," Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II, writes, "Love explained all for me, / all was resolved by love, / so this love I adore / wherever it may be." When it's wintertime, we can let the assurance of love be what we rest in and give praise to.