Snowmen.
Compact, rolled to perfection.
Ever expanding, collecting, growing.
Freezing cold, heavy, piled high.
The bigger, the better.
Perfectly sculpted, no rough edges.
Time spent, hard work.
Sweat freezing in layers, mittens icy.
An old hat, buttons, and a tattered scarf.
Reaching, placing things just right.
A long hunt through the yard.
Searching, rejecting, approving.
Two sticks, two perfect arms.
Broken pieces of a grin.
A quick dash into warmth.
Into the fridge, an orange, crooked nose.
Back into the snow globe.
Stumbling and sliding, striving.
A face, completed, just right.
Buttons perfectly aligned.
Arms ever reaching upward.
Completion.
Satisfaction.
Self satisfaction.
I’ve built a lot of snowmen in my life.
No, I don’t mean the ones you’re thinking of. You’re imagining the cute, sweet sculptures that come to life in our yards and in our hearts. The ones we love to look at
through the lazily falling snow, the ones we take pictures of and keep as memories as we grow older and reminisce upon, the ones we watch on television with our
families piled on the couch preceding Christmas.
My snowmen are just as wonderful. They are intricately made, designed and built for one reason: to please. A good majority of the time, they’re built to please me. Not
my neighbors, not strangers walking by, not the deer who want to steal my carrots, just me. On a rare occasion, I’ll build them to impress others, but only out of
selfish ambition. “Look! Look at my creation! Look at it’s detail, it’s beauty. Appreciate me, appreciate my talents.“
Each of them is different, unique in character and in motive. They are big and small; an army of cold men and women standing with frozen smiles eternally gracing
their faces, arms never quite grasping what they reach for. An entire field is devoted to them in my unending wintry season. They are my masterpieces. I devoted long
hours to building them, each holding importance in my life. If one loses a button or an arm falls off, I fix it and I fix it quickly. I have no space for disorder in
my cold little army. I cherish them, constantly tending to them.
And that’s when it happens.
FLICK.
FLICK FLICK FLICK FLICK.
Snowmen explode everywhere. Hats fly, carrots break, stones wreak havoc and take casualties, other snowmen in the immediate area crumble. My little wonderland is
crashing down. My creations, the things I’d spent so much of my time building up and perfecting (in my eyes) were being obliterated. Mass. Carnage.
And here is God, simply sticking a massive, strong, warm hand into my snowy field and ready, aim, FIRE! All he has to do is flick and heads roll. Literally. There goes
a snowy ball with two stone eyes and a carrot nose, rolling far into the distance, out of my field.
He looks at me, fully knowing what He’s doing, and His eyes are so full of sadness. Not because He is destroying my beautiful snowmen that I loved so deeply, but
because I had built up so many idols before Him. Because I had poured into so many other facets with so much devotion by myself and for myself. In my field of snow
people, I had all the company of a person on a desert island and yet I convinced myself otherwise. I had built myself a life over the course of the winter that just wouldn’t last. And as I looked into His eyes, my own now red and salty, I saw what I didn’t want to believe and what He had been trying to tell me all along: this season is coming to an end. Fast.
All of the remaining snowmen stand crooked and broken or lay in misshapen piles, taking on a haunting, forlorn look, beckoning me to come back and mend them in their snowman
cemetery. I want to more than anything, but God had enough of watching me build my life out of something that would quickly disappear. All of these things that I spent
building, perfecting and serving are going to melt away come spring. They are just snow, easily broken apart, easily knocked over, made to simply dissipate when things
start warming up… figuratively speaking.
Moral of the story, God has a sense of humor giving me visions of exploding snowmen that make me burst into tears. In the middle of a restaurant.
Haha.
In actuality though, He doesn’t want us wasting all of our time, all of our lives building our dreams and our futures out of something that’s going to be gone as soon as the next season comes around, especially alone. Without Him.
I mean, come on. Jesus lived as a carpenter, a carpenter’s son. Who should we trust more than Him to build and shape our lives?
