There are weeks when the news feels less like information and more like a low‑grade fever—always humming in the background, throwing everything a little off‑center. Conversations with friends, parishioners, strangers in the grocery aisle all circle the same ache: confusion about who we are becoming as a people, and why it feels so counter to who God calls us to be. I hear it in their voices, and I feel it in my own chest. A kind of spiritual vertigo.

It’s not that I’ve forgotten how I’m meant to walk through the world. I know we’re called to keep our feet steady, not picking fights, but not stepping off the path of justice either. We are to raise our voices—not as clanging cymbals, but as people who believe love can still speak a truth sharper and more healing than fear.

But I would be lying if I didn’t say that some mornings the weight of it all presses so hard that I have trouble swinging my legs out from under the blanket. The political noise, the meanness dressed up as righteousness, the sharp division between Sunday proclamations and weekday actions—at times it feels like a kind of spiritual smog. You can move through it, but it takes a toll on your lungs.

What wears me down most is the compartmentalizing. How easily we tuck away the call to welcome the stranger, or care for the poor and the sick, or lift up the oppressed, as if these were optional assignments instead of the very heart of the gospel. I know I’m not alone in feeling heartbroken when people profess love of God with their lips yet turn toward the world with a clenched fist. It’s disorienting, and discouraging, and yes—deeply wearying.

So there I was this morning, standing at the window with a mug of coffee warming my hands. The house was quiet. The sky still half‑involved with night. I stood there trying to breathe myself into another day of this cultural and spiritual cacophony. The mug sent up little clouds of steam, soft and warm against my face, and for a moment that tiny cloud felt like a companionable sigh from the Holy Spirit. Not fixing anything. Not offering a headline‑proof shield around my heart. Just standing with me the way God sometimes does—close, steady, unforced.

As dawn began to unstitch the horizon, light crept gently across the drumlin. And there it was: the world wrapped in a fresh fall of snow. Clean and startling in its simplicity. Pure not because it is perfect, but because it is honest. Snow doesn’t attempt to be anything but itself—cold, quiet, unadorned—and its very presence slows things down. The goldenrod stems bowed under its weight. The raspberry canes arched like they had been painted by a patient hand. The fern fronds, once wild and reaching, lay softened and still.

For a long moment, I couldn’t look away.

There was something in that quiet whiteness that felt like a gift offered before I had even remembered to pray. A kind of divine pause. The world taking a breath so I could remember how to take mine.

Holiness often shows up like that—arriving in the most ordinary places, not with trumpets but with a gentle insistence. That’s what this snow felt like. Creation itself pausing, brush in hand, waiting for the next stroke—and inviting me to wait with it.

Because beneath all this heaviness, beneath the noise and the tension and the weariness of trying to walk faithfully in a world that keeps losing its way, hope hasn’t gone anywhere. It may be quieter these days. Less fiery. More like a thin ribbon of light edging its way across a field. But it’s here. Holy. Steady. Divine.

The snow reminded me that even in chaotic seasons, God is still capable of creating a blank canvas. Not to erase what has been, but to allow something new to be imagined. Something gentler. Something more whole.

I don’t know what tomorrow’s news will bring. I don’t know how the conversations will unfold or how heavy the air will feel. But this morning, in the cold purity of that unblemished snow, I felt a small and sacred promise: There is still room for goodness. There is still space for mercy. And when we cannot find our center, God offers us a quiet place to stand until we do—a breath of cold air…a fresh canvas…a hope that is both fragile and fiercely alive.

And for today, that is enough.