It's Snowing in Paris. . .

I'm sitting here tonight in a sort of melancholy mood. I suppose that isn't too unusual, given the fact that I buried my mother two days ago, and a couple of other personal challenges have presented themselves. I'm fighting the temptation to drift into a certifiable funk. I've been sitting idly at the computer, plugging different locations around the world into weather.com to see what the weather is like there. If that isn't a low point, I don't know what is.

But I'm fighting it.

As I was doing the dishes tonight, wallowing in a little puddle of self-pity, it occurred to me that I am not the only one going through "stuff." A good friend lost her sister yesterday; a sweet man on our staff has a wife who is facing surgery for breast cancer and another friend is going through chemo. I guess it's just human nature that, when we are beset by difficulties, we tend to focus only on the negatives, and we fail to look at the greater positives that are all around us. It's like looking at a dot drawn in the center of a sheet of paper and focusing on that instead of all the space around it.

These are light and momentary burdens and God is in control; so as I sit here in my kitchen, venting into my computer, focusing on my own little world, the Champs Elysee is blanketed in white, and the bare limbs of the chestnut trees stand in stark contrast as snow falls on the streets of Paris.

But it won't be long until spring.