As autumn becomes more winter-like, the mornings are darker and colder.
On the chilliest mornings, I look outside to see whether our car windshields are frosted over. Sometimes my husband cleans mine for me since he almost always leaves first—and I always smile and think how lucky I am.
This morning, however, I wasn’t thinking of the frost. I went outside, slipped into the driver’s seat, and glanced up to discover that the windshield was covered. Instead of the frost I’m used to seeing, however, the glass was enveloped in a beautiful, delicate pattern of ice.
It took my breath away.
The ice had spread up and across the windshield in feathery shapes, lines and textures intertwined in an artsy magical way. I have never seen ice that looked like that—and, it occurred to me—I might never see it like that again.
A frozen windshield usually makes me grumble. But this! It stopped me in my tracks. Before I turned the car’s defroster on, I reached for my camera. Then I sat for a few minutes and marveled at God’s extraordinary creativity in this most ordinary encounter.
Soon enough, the ice melted away, without requiring any scraping. With my windows clear and clean, I pulled out of the driveway to head to work.
As the day went on, though, my mind went back to that unexpected encounter with nature. It felt as if God had given me a personal gift. And it occurred to me that there is also a beauty to the frost that I complain about when it delays my day. I might just be looking at it with the wrong perspective.
If my windshield were covered with feathery patterns of ice every morning, maybe I would complain then, too. But today all I saw was the beauty and the elegance and the miracle of that display that God left for me on the glass.
“It was this beautiful, natural world that slowly led me back to God,” wrote Dorothy Day, who passed away this week in 1980. “’How can there be no God,’ I asked, ‘when there are all these beautiful things?’”
What a beautiful reminder. And what wondrous gifts our Father gives us if we just open our eyes to see them.
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