Joy to the world! The
Lord is come: let earth receive her king;
Let every heart
prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.
With “Joy to the world” in our hearts and minds, I invite
you to join me in looking each of these twelve days for instances of the joy
that runs through all of creation, especially through experiencing the beauty
and wonder of God’s world.
Temperatures above 50 degrees today in our part of
Nebraska along with a good dose of midday sun helped it feel very comfortable
outside despite a fairly good breeze. In the afternoon, we walked at a lake where whatever ice
had formed earlier was melting. Leaves that had been caught in the top of the
ice when it had frozen had absorbed enough heat from the sun to begin melting the
ice around each leaf.
It’s such an elegantly simple example of something all of us
who have lived with ice and snow know, that darker surfaces absorb heat from
the sun and speed the thawing of ice and snow around them. This is why the
melting of Arctic ice has produced a feedback loop that has accelerated the
melting: as ice melts, open water is exposed. The open water absorbs heat from
the sun that would be reflected by ice. As more heat is absorbed, the melting
of the ice is accelerated.
There’s some joy in knowing that we understand a lot about
the science of climate change. Should the powers that be ever decide to do
something significant to mitigate climate change, scientists can help to maximize
that effort. But the beauty of each little depression slowly growing as the sun
shone was the surest and most immediate joy, wonder enough for today.
Joy to the world! The
Savior reigns; let us our songs employ, while fields and floods, rocks, hills,
and plains, repeat the sounding joy.
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