The Bare Bush In Snow

(You Are My Hiding Place; Amy Carmichael)

I know that the Lord is great-greater than all gods-He makes clouds rise from the end of the earth; he sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses.

“Have you entered [my] treasuries of snow...which I reserve...?”Psalm 135:5,7; Job 38:22

You were like a leafy bush, and many little things came for you to shelter. You were not great or important, but you could help those little things.

And it was the joy of your life to help them.

Now you can do nothing at all.

Some desolation—illness, monetary loss, or something you cannot talk about to anyone, a trouble no one seems to understand—has overwhelmed you. All your green leaves have gone.

Now you cannot shelter even the least little bird. You are like a bush, with its bare twigs. No use to anyone.

That is what you think.

But look again at this bare bush. Look at the delicate tracery of its shadow-lines on the snow. The sun is shining behind the bush and so every little twig is helping to make something that is very beautiful. Perhaps other eyes, that you do not see, are looking on it too, wondering what can be made of sun and snow and poor bare twigs…

The spring will come again, for after winter there is always spring.

But when will the spring come? When will your bush be green with leaves again? When will the little birds you love come back to you? I do not know. Only I know that sun and snow are working together for good. And the day will come when the memory of helplessness and inability to give help to anyone else, or the memory of hard financial times, or of loneliness, loss or isolation—these will all pass as a dream in the night. All that seemed lost will be restored.

Now, in the midst of so much unhappiness, engulfing your heart in cold, let these words seep down –like fingers of sunlight, like trickles of first-spring rains—to refresh your inmost soul:

He will not fail you, who is the God of the sun and the snow.

My Father, forgive me for forgetting…that even when cold and snow come…you are still in charge of everything!And you know, Father, that desolate place in me that needs the gentle touch of resurrecting rains today...