Okay, so we didn’t dodge every winter weather bullet this year. But our big snow a few weeks ago hardly felt like a bullet at all. At my house, the snow was more beautiful than bothersome.
It blew in, made all things bright and beautiful, and was pretty much gone without a trace a mere 36 hours later. Like a perfect houseguest.
Speaking of houseguests, we had some friends who came over as the snow came down on that Friday evening and ended up staying overnight because, as we all know, one must stay off snowy roads in the South, even if you bought a four-wheel-drive truck and feel a deep need to justify that purchase.
It’s just too darn risky to share snowy roads with a bunch of crazed drivers on their way to buy enough bread and milk to last them until April. After all, nobody knows how to drive on snow … except us, of course. Am I right? It seems like no one ever thinks HE or SHE might be the one who doesn’t know how to drive on snow. It’s always those OTHER crazies you have to look out for.
When it started snowing a couple of Fridays ago, my son, his wife and daughter had just hit the road to go to Hilton Head. (By the way, have I mentioned recently that my little granddaughter is the CUTEST child ever?) Although it was snowing here when they left, my son was sure they could get a step ahead of the snow as they headed south. Wrong.
When Ryan called rather late that night to report that they’d arrived safely, his description of their trip sounded like a chapter from some epic novel about war refugees trudging across Siberia in the dead of winter. He reported that cars were sliding into ditches left and right and snow was coming down so hard you could barely see a car length ahead of you.
Everyone, no doubt, was thinking that everyone else had no business being on the road.
I was glad Ryan called me after they had already gotten safely to their destination. The snow I was watching out my windows would have seemed a lot less idyllic had I known some of my favorite people in the universe were out there driving in it. I was glad that like most grown males, Ryan had forgotten to tell us about his travel plans. (While parents of grown females apparently sometimes know what their daughters are doing, parents of grown males almost never do. It’s a law of the universe.)
Hearing Ryan recount his adventures on the road was pretty entertaining. At one point he said, “I’m a Southerner. It’s not like I grew up driving on snow. But these people were crazy! I had to pass some of them because it was more dangerous to be behind them than it was to go around them.”
Passing cars on snowy roads with reduced visibility? Ryan is a good driver, but at that moment, I realized that craziness, like beauty, is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.
We see it so clearly in others and so rarely in ourselves.
We’re not the crazy ones, reckless ones, immoral ones, prideful ones, unloving ones, unspiritual ones, slack ones, wrong ones.
It’s “them.”
But what if maybe…just maybe…sometimes it might not be them? What if sometimes it might be us?
Jesus said in Matthew 7:3, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
Wonder how much better we’d all see if we took some time to pull out a few logs?