Wintertime Annunciations

On Saturday afternoon I trotted out to my most treasured thinking spots at Shawnee Mission Park. Hat and gloves in tow, I gingerly stepped on the remnants of snow - most of it covered in ice, in some spots pristinely untouched by man or beast.

As I tried to keep my footing, my eyes, wide and searching, reveled in the frosty droplets God had deposited on the grounds.

That hour of reflection and snapshotting was bitterly cold. While the wind slapped my cheeks, the song “Refuge” rattled about my head, “When it's cold outside, there's no need to worry ‘cause I'm so warm inside. You give me peace when the storm's outside...”

Those words, the photographs I took, and the fat, rolling thoughts I later penned in my journal make me want to officially welcome winter.

Hello, friend. It's nice to have you back around.

****
















“You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.”
Psalms 74:17




"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."
Josh Billings



"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
Albert Camus



"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show."
Andrew Wyeth

















"It is a pleasure to the real lover of nature to give winter all the glory he can, for summer will make its own way and speak its own praises."
Dorothy Wordsworth