Excuse me pretty baby but I always take the long way home...

It's a rare Winter Wonderland outside today and I have been feeling pretty sentimental... Here's why:

#1. I live in a home built on a mountain. I hear the wind howling past the walls and whipping through the trees as I am falling asleep. There is nature crowding in around me at all hours of the day, poking its head through my superficial fog and reminding me of what beauty means. Today, I look outside and I see trees weighed down with inches of snow as light as powdered sugar but still heavy when piled on and I am reminded of how grace can cover our mistakes as smoothly and as gracefully (no pun intended) as the white blanket that fell over the world last night.

#2. I found a bird yesterday. It had been snowing an hour and as I walked to my car, snowflakes falling in my hair and landing in my eyelashes, I nearly stepped on a ball of feathers on the asphalt. I stopped, looked and realized it was a bird. Benji, who was with me warned that it was a dead bird carrying diseases, but I reached down and picked the golf sized ball of fluff up anyways. Have you ever held a bird in your hand? It is an experience that makes you feel like Snow White at her finest. There is a disbelief that floods your mind as you look down at an altogether flighty creature that is now curled up in your palm with no intentions of moving. I clutched the small green and yellow bird to my chest, trying to determine whether it was injured or just cold. I couldn't find any wounds or broken bones, and so I just stood and stared at it as it clung to my dress. A group of men crowded around me, inquiring if they could "pet" it. As I stared at grown males who were now acting like second grade girls, I realized that it doesn't matter how old or manly you may be: a bird in someone's palm fills you with wonder. The bird couldn't come home with me but I didn't feel okay just tossing it into the cold so I found a tree with a Y at the bottom and placed my scarf in a nest like bundle on the ledge. I put the little bird in the scarf and watched as it tucked its little head into its shoulder and huddled down into its warm bed. As I walked away, I said a little prayer.

#3. Things are rough, emotionally, for me. I feel wounded and vulnerable. And yet, with every hurt and disappointment, I feel God's grace finding me at an even deeper level. Here I am, worried sick about this and that, and a bird and a blanket of snow are placed at my doorstep all within a 24 hour period. HE shows His love for me in ways that are individual and personal. He loves me enough to know my innermost desires; ones like peace (a wintery morning) and fulfillment (tucking a bird into a warm scarf). I am loved by a Savior that knows who I am and what I need.

Norah Jones sings: "Excuse me pretty baby, but I always take the long way home." I do too. And do you want to know why? Because the long way home is marked with beauty. On the long way home, I get a chance to think, to contemplate, to romanticize. And I want my reality to be the kind that I find on the long way home.