Greetings, 

We finally experienced our first heavy snow of the year. I am guessing 6-8 inches at my home. It was a very peaceful storm that, little by little, over the course of 12 hours, kept adding layer and layer of thick snow. All afternoon and into the evening the cars were driving very slowly. The next morning, as I headed into the bakery, I found the road to be very messy. It was covered with snow. Some of the snow was hardened into ice making the road very bumpy. The cars were still driving very slowly even though it was sunny and not snowing. The road was very narrow as well. I thought to myself that the snow plows must not have went at all last night and will be starting this morning. Just then, I noticed a snowplow coming my way. I had to pull way over into deep snow to let him by. I thought to myself 'now the road will be cleared' but after he went by the road didn't look much different. In fact, most of the morning as I paid attention to the roads, they didn't get much better. It took lots of salt, plenty of warm sunshine, several scrapes by snow plows, lots of traffic and no more snow for the road to get back to normal.  As I thought about this, it made me think about my life. When I was born my road was clean and smooth. But as I grew, the circumstances around me, the choices that I made, the things I have done, all had the potential to be snow falling on the road of my life, over the course of time, I have found areas of my life to be covered, bumpy, icy and narrow...sometimes difficult to navigate. I would find myself wanting to find the quick fix. I would throw a little salt here and shovel just a little there or look for a snowplow to clear it all out. I found my dilemma to be two-fold. First, I kept letting the snow fall. There is no way to get ahead of snow removal if it just keeps falling. As long as I kept doing the things that heaped the snow on the road of my life. it was never going to be easier traveling. Second, I realized that there is no amount of shoveling or salt throwing that I can do to get rid of the slush on my road. There is no magic snowplow in this world that will take it away. That is, until I realized that only God could remove my slushy mess with his ultimate snowplow Jesus. Only then could my road be cleared. I still may have a road that is marred and scratched and have a few potholes, but someday it will be paved with gold! Can you say road trip! Awesome! 

Blessings, 
Chris