Sometimes beauty pops up at the wrong time.

Nobody told these daffodils that they weren’t supposed to come up yet.  Nobody told them not to bloom.  They just did.

We had a warm spell about 6 weeks ago, following a pretty hard cold snap.  These guys pushed through the ground around the beginning of January, really believing in their little bulb hearts that it was spring.

 

I was afraid they would wilt away when another cold snap hit.  Last week we wore no jackets. But on Tuesday we had ice.  Yesterday we had snow.

It’s so weird living in Georgia.

Ice, in itself, is beautiful. Just ask Elsa the Snow Queen.

(Beautiful, powerful, dangerous, cold! You have that song in your head now, don’t you? You’re welcome.)

There were many in our area without power–some still are, 2 days later. I’m grateful we were never hit with a power outage. This was apparently Winter Storm Octavia of 2015. I don’t know, I was stuck watching PBS Kids and Netflix while the kids were home from school. Again, I’m grateful we didn’t lose power.

The rest of the day has was consumed with a trip to the pediatrician’s, the grocery store, preschool pickup, reheating leftovers, watching intermittent snow flurries, and greatly desiring more coffee.

But I’ve been pondering the mercy of unexpected, untimely even, beauty. We expect flowers in May, but not in early February. We expect a little extra love on our birthdays, but not on an ordinary gray Wednesday. We expect God to come alongside and help us when we’re doing great, but not when we’re falling all over ourselves, and really can’t muster much of anything righteous, faithful, or otherwise.

The oddity of these instances increases their beauty; they may not even be noticed in a more “seasonable” time. Redemption presses through ashes. It is the beauty that sprouts from bitter cold, with the hope of the warmth of the sun.