Rev. Ray and Pat Amos

Job 37:6

“For He said to the snow, Be thou on the earth…”

I was home on leave from the Air Force, and Pat and I took a walk in Pearisburg. The snow was just enough to create a canvas for her beauty. We held hands while walking down the streets of town beneath the twinkling lights of sleeping stores. Like the old soldier who had forever stood on the pedestal in the courthouse lawn, the towering mountain stood over the town it loved. The falling feathery flakes were like stardust falling upon a young couple with a path before them as invisible as the sidewalk beneath the snow.

Later we were married and walked in snow by a lake in Rapid City. A swan watched under the moon light. Our footprints were covered almost as fast as we made them, but it didn’t matter because we held hands and made new steps on a path we could not see.

Faith can be something like walking a trackless snow-covered path. You know it is there, but you step where you can’t see. I remember the first time our grandson saw snow falling. He looked through eyes of Austin in absolute wonder, and then he reverently whispered, “Stars!”

In Bluefield we would look out the window, and Pat would repeat the words of a hymn: “…snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.” At the church a ceramic nativity sat by the side of the road. It disappeared beneath frozen snow. As the winter went on we recovered it piece by piece as ice melted and they appeared. The last piece to appear was a baby called Emmanuel. God is with us even when we can’t see Him.

It was the week before Easter when Jesus appeared in that snow by the side of the road; a parable in itself. The walk of life is a trackless path. The difference for a Christian is that we walk it hand in hand with Jesus. Like a towering mountain God stands strong over us as we walk through “gently falling stars” on the unseen but certain walkway that God has given us. It is the path that leads His children home.

Grace and Peace, Rev Ray

“Link to YouTube Video – Be Thou My Vision.”