February And Life Snowballs

It’s a snowball of sorts.

Little things turn into bigger things, the list of to-do’s explode until there is simply no way to accomplish all of it, and a minor set back becomes a nearly impossible major reset. And a pain. This is life. It snowballs.

Out the back of our house my husband and grandson rolled a ball of snow, small and manageable, the kind that should make for the beginnings of a great snowman. They didn’t seem to know when to quit however. It got bigger and bigger until they couldn’t move the weighty mass. It was too big. It was too heavy. It was gigantic.

They couldn’t lift it.

Life can be a bit like that too-big ball of snow, can’t it? The insignificant becomes significant. The niggle starts to naggle. And before we realize it, the whole thing is too heavy to carry.

February is often like that for me. It’s kind of my melancholy month, an in-between time of year after the high of the holidays. February feels cold, bare, tinged with the realities of another year, but before the new bloom of spring.

This year is no exception and there is heaviness in my February soul. But a verse which has encouraged me in the past resurfaced in my mind again, giving a certain stability to my often unreliable feelings. As I thought about my husband and grandson, in the back yard, with that big round burden, I found it soothing to my mind’s February blues.

“Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.” (Psalm 37:5 ESV)

Isn’t that, the committing and trusting and believing, sort of what the second month of a New Year is all about? Freshness starts to become stale, and reality bogs down good intentions. Things to worry about surface, and life begins to snowball.

“Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil,” David says. (Psalm 37:8 ESV)

He writes this Psalm as an older man, one experienced in the same sort of tensions we face, between the way things should be and the way things are.

His heart has also been troubled by things that don’t make sense to him. He stands in the unease of wrong versus right, evil versus good, what if’s and whys. He lived in the reality of events which had not turned out as projected. But David has also seen the way fretting obscures the actions of a trustworthy God. It flavors our tastebuds with bitterness, and blinds us to blessings around us.

Disquiet in my soul is a thief. It robs me of my delight in the Lord. It cheats rest and syphons trust in Him.David has also seen the way fretting obscures the actions of a trustworthy God. Share on X

“Commit,” David prods.

Its meaning in Hebrew literally means, “roll.”

And, as I watch that turning snowball outside pick up more snow, wrapping itself in more weight, until Grandpa and Grandson couldn’t move it, I saw my weighted February more clearly.

David, who experienced highs and lows spiritually, emotionally, and physically in his life, found a way to delight in the Lord, despite his unsolved in-between-answers place. He found a way to move ahead in life when everything seemed stuck, by giving it up to a Sovereign Righteous Father.

David rolled his heavy burden onto the Lord.

He discovered that only God could move the unmovable. Fretting didn’t help. And so, in his acquired years and wisdom, David gave an answer to my February in-between doldrums.

David rolled over the perplexing, fretful, evil happenings and the people that caused them to God. He took them off his own shoulders, and placed them on God’s.David rolled his heavy burden onto the Lord. Share on X

The giant snowball in the back yard finally budged, slowly at first, cumbersome. But once it got going, it picked up speed faster and faster down the hill, until it was out of sight. There it broke up into a million trillion pieces of powder.

It’s journey was accompanied with cheers and great rejoicing.

Maybe February seasons are brought into our lives as gifts from God, because they can remind us of His power and care. They call to us, inviting us to roll all that we carry into His capable hands.

“He will act,” David assures us.

When I turned to go back into the house, I found the snowball effect had lightened a bit of my own heaviness.

Those fretful little niggles and the ginormous boulders aren’t really mine. They are His.

*Photos by Sylvia Schroeder