The first full day of spring.

It snowed all day long. Not much of it stuck, but the sky was gray and the clouds too close to the ground and the air stiff with its own chill from morning to nighttime. Even inside it was cold, even with the heater running, even beneath two thick shirts. I wondered if we'd ever see the first flower of the year, or if it would remain buried in life-forbidding snow.

Snow falling is frustratingly silent. You can't hear it piling on itself, or hitting the lamp-posts, or falling off the branches of trees. It moves like a too-pale ghost of itself, finger raised to lips in a shush of all it touches. When it has fallen, only hard cold and muffled sound are left.

And impossible white. The world beneath snow is only a contour of reality, but no less real than what lies under it. It isn't the shape of snow, but its white whiteness, that is foreign. Because we're used to color; because we're used to conflict; because we're used to asymmetry and chaos. Snow shakes us into acknowledgement that uniformity and purity and stillness are possible.

The Bible uses snow as a metaphor for our sinfulness after Christ removes it. When His blood has finished its purifying work, we're left white as snow. But this is no mere blanket over us, the whiteness begins within and spreads slowly out to everything we think, say, and do. The main difference is that with snow the change is often accomplished overnight.

Kind of like manna in the desert—the children of Israel woke up, and there was white manna all around like snow. They ate it, and it was good because it was the food God gave them. Manna like snow, manna like communion, each thing a symbol of itself and something else, each one showing our incapable minds just a little more of God and His goodness.

Snow and manna are mysteries. But their properties, where they come from and how, are less important than what they represent. The significance of all things lies in their relation to the Maker, and not in their constitution and form. Our redeemed state in Christ is not just like snow; snow is like our redeemed state, and reflects it the same way it reflects house lights and moonbeams.

Some part of me has always disliked snow. It makes driving difficult, it's cold, and when it's gone it leaves mud and wet. But snow was here before our petty inconveniences, and it will be here long after we've become fully sanctified in Christ's presence. It will continue to reflect the power of His salvation, and it will continue to fall like manna on a weary and starved people, and we will watch it fall from His hands together with Job, and David, and all those whose hearts He's cleansed from the beginning of time and forever.