Art, Poetry, Music, and Nature for the New Year
Sunday, February 14 2021
Valentine’s Day

The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster

Word
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. John 15:13

Nature

https://kuc.org/wp-content/uploads/Feb-14-e1613302801531.jpg

Frost, by Joyce Rupp

The bitter cold of winter can change your mood, can make things that were once possible impossible, can make you want to just curl up inside and stay put until spring. But there is yet growth, beauty, and an ever-inward possibility of the Spirit of God drawing near. Through the layers of winter’s frost, it is possible to connect to that deepest part of ourselves, and be pulled toward the Holy One. Joyce Rupp recalls an experience of frost in her book Praying Our Goodbyes:

“One winter morning I awoke to see magnificent lines of frost stretching across my window panes. They seemed to rise with the sunshine and the bitter cold outside. They looked like little miracles that had been formed in the dark of night. I watched them in sheer amazement and marveled that such beautiful forms could be born during such a winter-cold night. Yet, as I pondered them I thought of how life is so like that. We live our long, worn days in the shadows, in what often feels like barren, cold winter, so unaware of the miracles that are being created in our spirits. It takes the sudden daylight, some unexpected surprise of life, to cause our gaze to look upon a simple, stunning growth that has happened quietly inside us. Like frost designs on a winter window, they bring us beyond life’s fragmentation and remind us that we are not nearly as lost as we thought we were, that all the time we thought we were dead inside, beautiful things were being born in us.”

Blessing
May we be, too, little miracles, formed in the dark of night. Amen