I’m sitting in the sunroom as I write. It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning and it’s snowing. It’s been snowing all night long. When I heard that it was going to snow I was like a kid at Christmas. I was so excited! As I look out the windows, in the dim light the snow lies undisturbed on the lawn and clings to the trees and shrubs. It’s beautiful, a veritable winter wonderland.

It’s now sometime after five o’clock and I hear the snowplow scraping the road. But it continues to snow and it will coat the road again. Soon it will be light and the birds will be coming to the feeding station — cardinals and chickadees, nuthatches, titmice and others — for their daily diet of sunflower seeds, cracked corn, millet and hot pepper suet.

Hot pepper suet? Yes. The birds love it, the critters don’t. One day I hung regular suet and hot pepper suet out for the birds. A bear visited sometime during the night, bent the crook on which the suet was hung to the ground, ate the regular suet but left the hot pepper suet untouched.

Well, back to the subject of snow. It is an inconvenience but it is at the same time very beneficial to the environment. Isn’t it wonderful how God sends something so beneficial, and in such a delightful way?!

Whenever it snows a Bible verse comes to mind. It is Isaiah 1:18, and in the old King James Version it reads like this: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

Put another way and not nearly as eloquently, a modern version of the text reads, “Come now, let us argue this out, says the LORD. ‘No matter how deep the stain of your sins, I can remove it. I can make you as clean as freshly fallen snow. Even if you are stained as red as crimson, I can make you as white as wool’”(New Living Translation).

King David, after the prophet Nathan had exposed his grievous sins, prayed to God saying, “…wash me and I shall be whiter than snow” (ps.1:7, KJV). And God did as He was asked.

So, snow which figures into the weather also figures into the Bible. And therein we see that God, Who sends the snow to benefit the environment, also extends the offer of forgiveness which, when asked for, removes the “stain” of sin and makes one “as clean as new fallen snow.”

Jesus saw in nature some parallels to spiritual truth. You find it in His parables. It seems to me we can find just such a parallel in the new fallen snow.