Grace in Wilderness

I love a good snowstorm. Lee did too. When the snowflakes were falling from the sky, I couldn’t help but feel like he was there with me.

Grief has felt a lot like snow lately. It arrives quietly, without asking permission. It covers everything in a delicate layer that changes the entire landscape of your life. Familiar places look different. Sounds are muffled. Colors are dulled. The world is still there, but nothing feels the same. And yet, somehow, it can be beautiful.

Not beautiful in the way we would ever choose, or in a way that makes sense. But beautiful nonetheless. In this season, I have learned that grief does not only take. It also reveals how deeply you loved, how deeply you were loved, and how intertwined two lives can become. It exposes the tender places in your heart you didn’t know existed until they were laid bare.

There are moments when the cold of it all bites hard. When the silence feels too loud. When the stillness feels like isolation instead of peace. And then there are moments when that same stillness feels holy—when the hush of the world feels like a gentle kindness from God, and the ache and the peace sit side by side without fighting each other.

I am learning that this is what the grief season looks like. Not constant devastation. Not constant strength. But a landscape forever changed, where sorrow and beauty exist at the same time, like snow quietly falling to the ground. It wasn’t until we were leaving our boot prints in the snow that the heaviness of what was missing really set in. Each step felt like a reminder that there should have been another set beside ours.

And when the day was over, and we were forced to retreat from the frozen landscape into the warm quiet of home, the loneliness felt louder. The silence left behind as the world held its breath made the loneliness ache inside me, but the cold air had softened it somehow. The stillness inside didn’t soothe it the same way. It simply made space for the absence.

And then the snow began to melt.

The landscape changes again. What was once bright and still turns into something messy and unfamiliar. The clean beauty gives way to muddy puddles, and the memory of what once blanketed everything so gently becomes distant.

But beneath the surface, something else is happening. The melting snow is soaking into the ground, nourishing roots you can’t see yet, preparing the soil for things that will grow long after the snow is gone. I think grief does that too. It changes the landscape. It makes a mess. It leaves you walking through places that feel unfamiliar and heavy. But somehow, in ways you don’t understand while you’re in it, it is tending to the soil of your heart.

And when the snow begins to melt, you realize the ground was being nourished all along.

And one day, something will grow there.

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