The year the snow fell

The optimistics said, "Probably not. Don't count on it."

The realists said, "Prepare yourself. It isn't happening."

I consulted with the experts, the marriage and family specialists, the preachers, the teachers, the wise church women and the gossiping ones. They all said the same. "Sorry, but probably not."

Some laughed. Some scoffed. Some rolled their eyes and told me to try harder, as if a young girl could control the winds. 

Some told me to chase a new dream - but how could a girl do that when her entire identity is in the dream she has searched so long for?

The wisest of them though, they knew the fear of the Lord. So we waited and we prayed. We prayed and we waited. The leaves fell, winter came, and the summer rains fell hard onto the earth. Not this year.

I changed locations again and again. I moved from house to house, seeking and searching, waiting and wishing. I praised and I cried and still, the same answer. 

Time passed. Too much time.

Would my husband ever know her? Would my children ever see her?

Would I ever have a husband or children, or would I destroy myself in my search? Would I be too broken and tired, too hopeless to submit another to my own weary quest?

I consulted one last expert with the age of my father but with wisdom unsurpassed. 

"Go home." It was his only advice.

Go home? Home to the heat and the bugs and the sub-tropics? To the place that I left?

Surely, what I wanted, what I needed, would not be there.

We prayed harder than ever before. 

I looked up into the sky in the front yard of my youth - nothing. It was still too warm.

I boarded a plane, then I boarded some more. Winter was ending soon, so I headed north and crossed an ocean on a gamble.

A week passed. Then two.

And then the snow began to fall.

Slowly, slowly at first the snow fell, treading its ground lightly.

"Don't get too excited," the locals said. "It won't last."

So we waited and we prayed. We prayed and we waited. 

It was a familiar dance, year after year. 

The thermostat continued to drop. The heat subsided. 

The skies opened up and poured down.

"Be careful," they said. "The pavement is slippery. Don't get attached, snow always melts."

But a bridge covered in ice is harder to burn than a bridge dry and crumbling from the scorching heat.

The snow had fallen because He is risen, the God of snowfalls and blizzards, brokenness and mothers. We waited and we prayed. We prayed and we waited until He answered.