Snow

A fresh blanket of snow is falling in my neighborhood today. I'm seeing something I rarely seen in the inner city: beauty. I am convinced that humans were made for beauty. It gives us reason to live and enjoy life. Fine music, quality artwork, innovative architecture, an exquisite cup of coffee, a well manicured garden -- these can be sources of great inner peace and contentment.

A part of me wonders if one of the causes of systemic poverty in America is simply the lack of beauty in the poor man's world. Seeing half of the houses boarded up and abandoned with yards untouched in years, noticing the piles of litter -- rusted beer cans, smashed glass bottles that once held cheap vodka, cigarette butts, even ammunition shells -- scattered in ever conceivable place. This is a world of concrete where everything is grey. Life does not thrive here. Green is a rarity. We in the city have paved paradise and put up a parking lot, as the songwriter says. I have friends who have never seen a lake or a farm or a mountain. And it makes me wonder what kind of person I would be had spent ever waking moment of my life trapped within the concrete jungle.

But today the ugliness is covered by pure white. Mounds of trash have become pristine and untouched knolls of soft clouds. Even the ugly abandoned houses next door have a sort of romantic, mysterious aura to them as they hide beneath a white blanket. It is almost as if the near Eastside has been made new -- even if only for a few hours. For a moment our cracked and weed-ridden sidewalks are as smooth as those of the suburbs. Our potholes disappear. And our collective poverty subsides for a moment as people gather around their cracked windows to catch a rare glimpse of beauty coming down from the sky.

Thank you, God, for snow. Thank you for beauty. And thank you for saying, "Behold, I make all things new." Come, Lord Jesus, come.