Residents of middle Tennessee received an unexpected blessing in January. It started snowing one Sunday evening and didn’t let up for 24 hours, then a polar plunge in temperature ensured a snow-covered landscape for more than a week—much longer than the typical Tennessee dusting. This snow was significant. We measured eight inches in our backyard.
The world was transformed. On the rare occasion our neighborhood turns into a wonderland, I like to raise the shades throughout the house so that every time I glance outside, I see the beauty. The frigid temperatures don’t stop me from bundling up and walking the streets, admiring the snow-covered branches and bushes, smiling at the makeshift snowmen waving from front yards, hearing kids yelping and playing amid the sounds of sleds and snow-crunch. My youngest son and I trudged our way up to the small hills within walking distance and then to a large hill off the interstate ramp close to our home. It was magnificent.
Ten days later, I was overcome with a sense of sadness while I drove through the neighborhood. The normal gray, rainy days of a Tennessee winter had returned, washing away the charm, leaving the yards a dirty brown, the grass moist and the bushes saggy. The sense of loss was palpable after rain extinguished the delight, and bleak skies cast a pall over the landscape.
In Andrew Peterson’s “You Came So Close,” there’s a line that’s always resonated with me:
And the sky in Nashville
It can bend you low
’Cause the winter here is gray
Without a trace of snow
That’s almost always true. But this year we did get snow. And somehow, the grayness was worse once the snow went away.
I can handle a couple months of cold and dreary winter when snow is a far-off hope that never materializes. But it’s harder to endure the drabness of a Tennessee winter after the magic has vanished, to feel the sense of loss when you look at the empty yards that days before were playgrounds for chirping children, to see the snowy hill once the center of excitement and laughter for dozens of dads and sons now reclaimed by barren winter sadness, to see the trees returned to their lifeless state as if the rainy mist signals their weeping at the snowmelt.
Sometimes it’s the loss after happiness that hurts the most. Remembered joy intensifies present sadness.
The northeast United States was once called the “burned-over district” because after the fires of revival spread through the Great Awakenings, these places turned into desolate wastelands where the soil was hard and the Spirit seemed absent.
There are burned-over districts in other areas of life. Maybe you know this feeling in your church: the spiritual drought is difficult because you remember vividly when God was at work in undeniable ways. The quietness of the nursery is a stab of longing every Sunday morning because you remember the joy when that part of the building was abuzz with activity.
Maybe it’s returning to your childhood home or a town you once knew well, seeing all the changes, or seeing in new light what has stayed the same.
Maybe you know this feeling with your friends and family. A relationship with a now-grown son or daughter has broken down, and the distance you feel is compounded by earlier joy and happiness. Maybe you’ve lost a family member, and your grief is heightened by the joy you once shared. The magic of your years together, marked by snowcapped mountains of happiness, has disappeared, leaving a barren silence—the absence of your loved one is itself a presence, a haunting reminder of what once was.
When the Jews returned to their homeland and began reconstructing the temple decades after Solomon’s house for the Lord had been destroyed, the older exiles had the hardest time seeing the new foundation laid. While the younger generation celebrated the first signs of renewal, the older folks wept—mixing tears of celebration with sorrow and loss (Ezra 3:10–13). They’d seen the old temple. They knew what had been.
There’s no evading sorrow in this life. The older we get, the more we appreciate joy and wonder when it appears and the more we look back with wistfulness on joys after they depart. No matter how much we try to hold on to happiness, the world often settles back into sadness. The spell cast by the snow over the landscape is broken. We’re thankful when we recall the happy moments, but there’s a pang of loss, for they have passed.
Day recedes. Night falls. But as Andrew Peterson reminds us,
But there is no shadow
On the silver stars
And the colder the night is
Well the closer the heavens are
We may not feel the closeness of those heavens. We may have a harder time seeing the beauty in barrenness. But even the moments of joy in our past are just a prelude to the unending happiness that awaits the children of God.
Right now, even as I look out over the dreary world of late winter in middle Tennessee, giving thanks for the snow that gloriously interrupted our routines with its quiet majesty, I look ahead. There are patches of green showing up in some of these brown yards. The birds are back. A breeze is blowing. The first signs. . . . Spring.
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