Flurries

It was an early Sunday morning, and I was sitting, sipping my coffee and watching out the window as swirls of snow began to blow around in the wind and melt on their way to the ground in a wild late spring snowfall.

As I was looking, I thought of all the unrest of the last few weeks. All the people crying and protesting and arguing and fighting.

The proverbial straw had lit on the back of the camel, and the camel was reacting. And we, as a society have been reacting to the reactions as well. And there has been a lot of swirling of thoughts and emotions in the midst of it all. But to what end? Were these protests going to fizzle out and go away, like the ones that have happened before?

Like the snow out my window seemed to be doing.

As I watched the swirls of snow hitting the ground, it looked like they had just melted away into nothing. There was no accumulation, no drifts or piles, not even a light frost left on the ground.

“What a waste,” I thought. “All that activity and nothing to show for it.”

And I felt the soft voice inside me say, “That depends on where it landed.”

So I looked again. The garden ground was moist. The grass had a dampness about it. The wet leaves on the rose bush were shimmering in the morning sun. But the pavement in the street looked dry.

The soft ground, the new growing grass, the roses, they received the moisture. They took it in like they had the rain the day before and were benefited by it. But the paved road, the ground that was hard and that had let the water from the day before run off and dry up, did the same with the moisture left by the melted snow.

So the question is, are we soft? Are we growing and blooming? Are we ready to receive from today’s flurries? Will we be part of those who are benefited?

I remember the protests that erupted into riots in the 1960’s. I remember some of the discussions and arguments of the adults around me. Yes, I have seen good results from those protests. I have seen changes in this country in how people of color are treated. But I also see ways in which it hasn’t changed. I see how we speak of equality and say we are blind to color, yet still look twice at people who are different than us when they walk past us.

Today’s protests and the riots that accompanied them, are a result of hearts made sick by hope being so long deferred. There was so much hope for true freedom and equality, so many promises made. But hope, and promises have only partially been fulfilled. While we have seen good changes in our society, the experience of the promise of equality is in no way complete. We need to remember what the Scriptures say, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12 (CJB) We need to see more hope fulfilled. We need the fulfilled desire for equality to be a tree of life for all.

My prayer is that as the protests taper off, as they surely will, they will leave more lasting change than a light snow flurry. We need to water that tree of life by bringing fulfillment to the desire for true equality. We need more than the flurries. We need a drenching in understanding from others' experiences. We need to be drenched in the understanding that we are all created equal. And, we need to be drenched in the understanding that we all deserve to be treated that way.

We need to take it all in and bring change.

Elizabeth Darby Bass
June 15, 2020