wannabepriest

I saw this image the other day, taken from NORAD satellite imagery, of the United Kingdom in its current frosty condition – submerged below heavy snow. I honestly can’t remember a period like this where one heavy snowfall has followed another and another in such quick succession.

The usual deal with snow here is that it comes, it melts, it goes away. We are all inconvenienced for a day or two (and we really don’t *do* snow very well in this country) and then we get on with our lives.

This year has been most unusual, at least in my experience, in that it seems like the snow is here to stay.

I know we haven’t been the worst affected in the UK but even so, the picture from my back garden tells its own story. The garden table (with a bird table on it being well used by the local population at the moment) is covered in about 10 inches, I would guess, of this ‘orrible white stuff.

What has been interesting is that because it has stayed around this time, slowly but surely people have been *doing* snow a bit better. We’ve got our cars prepared better, the roads are gritted better (at least with a better rationing system focussed on the major routes), and we’ve all worked out how to get to work or church or whatever in other ways than our usual. With the exception of a few elderly members of our congregation, almost everyone was present yesterday morning at church. We adapt… relatively quickly and relatively well.

Of course, having an office downstairs in your house could be seen to be an advantage (or a disadvantage if you fancy slacking off). However, there’s not been any major impact to ministry caused by the snow other than that a guest speaker was unable to get to us and so yours truly had to fill in fairly late in the day.

I think extreme weather like this gives the church an opportunity to care which is what the good people of Walderslade have been trying to do. I do wonder why more churches don’t plan and have contingency plans in place for when their parish floods/gets locked in by snow/gets cut off by fallen trees/another ‘act of God’ since it seems a great opportunity to demonstrate the gospel in action and show why we love and are committed to our communities.