I’m always surprised at the sun’s power to melt snow, even on the very coldest days.
Take last Thursday—the coldest day of winter so far. The Thanksgiving weekend snow was still caked on roads and, in places, on our driveway. And yet, despite a temperature reading of only +8 degrees, I saw ice actually melting there. The wan light of that early December noontime sun was enough to coax a few drops of liquid off the edges of that ice.
Despite the extreme cold, the sun had that much muscle. And I think that’s amazing.
Think about it. You’ve probably sat under a lamp that, after a while, you realized was warming your skin, or the room. True? However bright that light was, the warmth you experienced was, I’m guessing, a mere fraction of the heat you’ve felt on your skin on a sunny day—not just in the middle of summer, but even on a casually sunny day at other times in the year.
This boggles my mind. A lamp—no matter how bright—that’s maybe 3 feet, or 18 inches from my arm has incredibly less warming power than the sun. That sunlight has, incredibly, traveled some 93 million miles to where I will either luxuriate in its warmth or, in summer, have to take action pretty quickly to prevent the sunburn that is the constant reality for us fair-haired types! Think of that: At that distance, the sun can literally burn our skin!
It’s beyond grasping how much bigger, brighter—and hotter—that sun has to be than any light we’ve known on earth, for that to be true!
I could turn this reflection to a homily about our Creator whose immensity and power is revealed in this observation.
I could point out that God shines on us like the sun, bringing light and warmth and melting our icy hearts, again and again.
You could probably come up with your own quasi-Biblical, theology-adjacent thoughts on this subject.
It’s enough for me—today, anyway—to simply notice. And to be glad that, even when we keep getting snow, seemingly every other day, and certainly every weekend(!) so far this season, we can be assured that, indeed, it will melt.
You probably know by now that I love the beauty and wonder of falling snow and way it drapes our landscape in such interesting and amazing ways. But even I am deeply glad that it melts. We do not live in a world like C.S. Lewis depicts in his Narnia series, where it is always winter and never Christmas.
Winter does not win. The ice will always, always melt. Literally, and in all the figurative ways we can imagine. Those days are surely coming.
