White out; isn’t found in a small white bottle

Such a picture perfect scenario. A white Christmas, or a beautiful white snow gently covering the buildings and children sledding… However, blizzards, white outs,  snow-storms aren’t exactly beautiful.  We have been caught in a mangle of snow. I call it a mangle because there is nothing neat and tidy about a mangle. When something gets mangled, it’s totally twisted and bent out of shape. This snowstorm, blizzard, white out or total shut down of southern Minnesota has been a bit amusing.

White out; isn’t found in a small white bottle. White out is when it’s white out. The wind is blowing 50 mph with 10 inches of snow blowing around and making Matterhorn Peaks out of billions of small beautiful flakes we call snow. We cannot see the arena doors. We can see Grandpa’s trailer but we won’t be going down the hill without going through six foot drifts. Jim took the snowmobile up to the neighbors to feed their dogs. They are gone. The daughter was to come and feed them. Not only can they not get out of where they live, but the roads are all closed in southern Minnesota so you could not get here anyway. As he drove by the window, he was even with the window. The snow banks are 5 feet above the driveway and if you didn’t know there was a road there, you wouldn’t know there was a road there.

Wow, two days off. We had plans. Many people had plans. Plans kind of got put on a back burner when all the roads were closed, people stranded on the roads, cars blocking the roads and snow plows stuck. I was to have a wonderful day celebrating my last day of helping a church in a nearby town. It was to have been a fun day at Cowboy church. It was to have been a celebration of a 90th birthday of a friend.

I slept in, I worked on a puzzle. I took a nap. We made lunch. I let the dogs out. I opened up the door and let the dogs back in. I did shovel the front porch and the back porch but it did no good. Baihley and Jim fell through snow banks they could not walk through to get to the barns. They had to shovel their way into the pastures to get the horses into the barns. There was no finding the watering tanks and some of the pastures are totally surrounded by the Alps of Southern Minnesota. We didn’t know we had mountains, but found out by looking out our windows it’s a pretty spectacular view.

White out doesn’t come in a bottle. White out comes when reality hits our lives and causes conditions that one cannot see through. It happens more times than we want to think about. We look up and thought we saw the road ahead and  realize that it’s not what we thought! The road that was there, suddenly isn’t there. We call out to God saying it’s not fair; that’s ok. God wants you to talk to him. He wants to hear about the things you can’t see. He wants to hear that one minute the visibility was 2 miles and the next you can’t see in front of your hand.  God wants to be the out in the white-out’s of your life. It might be that you can’t see, but there is an out. That out might meany you sit in a snowbank for awhile. That out might mean you walk through the valley. God’s plan is usually us enduring a few blizzards in life which give us plenty of time to think. I have had more naps in the past two days than I have had in weeks. Kind of nice. I have enjoyed quiet times, puzzle times, praying times and listening to pod-casts and worship services. Normally on a Sunday I only hear one sermon. Today I listened to four. Well actually, I just listened to the same two, two times. I hear it better the second time.  God lets me enjoy hearing it the first time and then talks to me the second time.   My friends got a bit more prayer time today. I drew pictures and wrote scripture and made fudge that didn’t turn out.

Hopefully in a couple days southern Minnesota will return to somewhat normal winter. But for the 24th of February, everything came to a stand still.  For me, I am thankful. We will enjoy our goodbye’s another time. We will do Cowboy Church next month. We will however talk about the Blizzard of February 2019 for a long time.. And I hope I remember the things God spoke to me about for even longer.