At my house in Idaho, it’s pretty much spring. Flowers have started to grow, trees are budding, and I even saw a blossoming one. 

    This morning I looked out the window. 

    Snow. 

This has happened before, at least twice this year. I could get angry and disappointed like I did last year, when the same thing happened, but I won’t. Why? Because I learned my lesson the hard way. 

    It was spring, finally spring after the tenth snowiest winter since 1892. We were happy to be warm again. It didn’t last long, though, because one spring morning we woke up to big, white, fluffy flakes falling heavily and covering the ground in a thick, cold blanket. Everyone who saw it wanted to scream in pure hatred of the snow! Angry comments on the unexpected weather littered the internet. Everyone wanted the winter to just end. 

    Everyone, that is, except one family. 

A family that only wanted to celebrate Christmas one more time with their dying little girl, who they knew probably wouldn’t live to see the next Christmas. 

They had picked that exact day. 

    All the other times snow had fallen late, it had been in small flakes that covered the ground in a thin layer of cold slush, with angry gray clouds in the sky, ending in a cold, wet day. That day, it came down in thick, fluffy puffballs floating down from a blue sky, creating a soft, white blanket on the ground, and evaporating away into a pleasant spring day by noon. 

    We didn’t even care that the snow had gone away, just that it had been there. That’s when we heard the story on the local Christian radio station. We all knew suddenly that the snow was a blessing, a miracle, for a family who really needed it, rather than a curse. We knew that we owed an apology to God. 

    I will never forget that late spring snow day in 2017. Today, March

25, 2018, another late snow day, I am tempted to cry in frustration at the late snow day. But I won’t. Why? Because I learned my lesson the hard way. 

This is is a true story.