This is my driveway. Note how in the spirit of personal security, I snowed out my license plate and not my address. Bad guys, don't come, you'll be sorely disappointed.
I'm going to preface this by saying it has been a really rough week. I have cried a lot. I have snotted a lot. I have been quite mean to the people I love. I don't know if this stems from yet another transition for my soldier (so nowhere to send our awesome Valentine's Day package), or entering a New Year without our Team physically in tact, or what. It might have been L's behavior at A's swim meet (during the required silence diving portion), or maybe the snow that falls non stop. It's just been a week of gray, dismal, me-ness.
Back to my driveway. It's been a work of heart. When I am really feeling at my wits end, I go out there and go to town. It's my new project. I have invested more money in special shovels, picks, and dog friendly rock salt then I care to admit. My goal is for the driveway to stay black pavement until May--when the snow in almost Canada stops. Today though, I was checking out my snowbanks.
A (the biggest kid), noted how ugly the ice/slush on the crisp white snow was. I agreed, and continued to chip away at the thick, hard ice that had formed on the edges, and threw it on top of the snow. Where else am I going to put it? You know why that stuff forms, right? It's not protected by the warmth or frequent use of cars and foot traffic, so builds and builds. Even when the sun does shine, the ice is so thick, it doesn't melt much. It needs a lot of help. It gets really dirty...exhaust from the car, sand, salt--it turns a dingy gray. It really is ugly, but it's tough--and strong from all of those harsh variables.
At this point I paused. It occurred to me that I have great snow banks. They don't fall down into the driveway when you brush past them. They are pretty resistant to the wind. I brushed my hand along one, and realized that there was a fresh coat of white snow adhering to the yucky, gray ice. Not just covering it--it was melding into the surface of the ice and becoming part of it, not just a coating. The bank was beautiful because of the easy snow--but strong because of the difficult, ugly, slushy, ice.
Those broken, used, dark pieces of cold, harsh ice made a very unstable pile of fluff a tenacious force of silent, calm, fortitude.
If you look to the left, there is a kind of couch/shelf looking structure at the end of the bank. That's what happens, when you're at your wits end, and a friend comes over and parallel parks her gigantic truck in your snowbank. And she only had to park in the bank in the first place because another friend had already come and was in the cleared out spot. Note that this didn't mar the snowbank's strength--it helped move things around, and made it stronger. Other friends decorated my snowbanks with snow paint, leaving colorful messages of support and love. A different friend is also the one who established these banks in the first place, when I wasn't in a place to do them myself.
God is in the habit of using weak and broken people. He doesn't call the equipped, he equips the called. I don't understand why He trusts me, but I trust Him. I trust Him with the people who help build my snowbanks and with the laborious task of shoveling, de-icing, and strengthening--my snowbanks and my soul.
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