We got several inches of clingy wet snow yesterday. It fell in such huge flakes…clumps really…that all day I thought it would amount to more than it did in the end. Still, in a few moments I will get the snow blower out and clear the drive. 🙂  It is enough snow for that.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I suited up, took my umbrella to keep the camera dry, and took a walk around the neighborhood looking for images. This is the last picture I took on my rounds. The shapes of the curling berry-whips are elegant enough in themselves to warrant an image…but I suspect I might not have seen them at all if not for the clinging snow. I danced around a bit, under my umbrella, looking for the right angle to catch the effect, and zoomed in out for the right framing. This one does it, I think.

Sony NEX 3NL-B with 16-50mm power zoom. Superior Auto. ISO 500 @ 1/160th @ f5.6. 75mm equivalent field of view. HDR processing in Snapseed on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 brought up the detail in the background water, and highlighted the texture of the snow.

And for the Sunday Thought: as I said above, I probably would have missed this photograph if not for the clinging snow…and even if I had see the elegant curls, it would have been a very different image without the contrast of the snow.

I was watching Bones last night, and Sealy, the main male character, and the religious foil for Dr. Brennan’s hyper-rationalism (if you don’t know the show, just the contrast there is enough to carry the point…religion vs rationalism) made a comment about God in the face of a serious cancer in a young colleague. Dr. Brennan, struggling to cope with her feelings about telling the young colleague that he has cancer, asks Sealy something to the effect of…”but doesn’t your belief in God imply that there is someone good behind what happens in this world?” Sealy replies along the lines of…”yes, but God tests us to see what we are made of…and so we will appreciate what we have.” That is pretty conventional wisdom in the Religious world.

I have to say, though, that it is, in my opinion, bad theolgy. When bad, and often genuinely undeserved, things happen to good people, I can not…I will not…believe that they are tests from God…or that God is trying to teach us to appreciate good. What does that say about who God is? I can not pretend to understand this, and even when I try to explain it to myself I get into snares and balls of contradiction…but my faith tells me that God is good…all good…with no shadow or turning. And that God is there with us, working for good, no matter what bad things happen to us in this world. The goodness of God is the ground of reality, and all that happens, happens against that ground.

It is not the snow in this image, in fact, that makes it…nor the berry whips of another season growing from the mulch under the snow…it is the light…always the light. To put it another way then, God’s good is the light in which we see all that happens to us. There will be shadow and shape and texture to our lives, things we consider good, and things we consider bad, beautiful peace and outrageous, senseless storm…but overall and through all and in all is the goodness of God, the light of this world. That is not, maybe, what religion says, and it may never satisfy a rationalist, but it is word of faith. God is good. God works for good in all things. End of story.

And yes, perhaps that truth is, like the beauty of berry whips, easiest to see in a storm.

Happy Sunday!