Joy: Day 4

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 of Christmas for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation, especially through experiencing the beauty and wonder of God’s world.

 Today was another unusually warm one, with temperatures in the upper 50’s. What snow we had is gone, and ice continued to melt. While the fields and pastures are their usual winter browns and grays, the dominant color in the Nebraska landscape as we drove east today was blue: blue sky all around, occasionally reflected in rivers, ponds, and streams where enough melting has taken place for open water to match the blue of the sky.

This evening the wind has shifted to the northwest, and the weather forecast says that our warm days are coming to an abrupt end overnight. There was joy in the break from the seasonal “bleak midwinter”. There will also be some joy in temperatures closer to the norm for this time of year, a return to those wintry days that will make the spring that much sweeter.

Joy to the world! The Savior reigns; let us our songs employ, while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy.