Kristi Pennington

On my walk through the woods near our house at the beginning of winter something caught my eye on either side of the trail. I saw what looked like bolls of cotton or even crumpled up tissue dotting the trail. It was strange! My curiosity led me to take in a closer look. At the base of tall wiry brown, brittle dead looking stems were white formations. I was looking at ice flowers! I’d never seen anything like this before! I didn’t even know they existed! What extraordinary beauty! To my joy, that evening the local weather forecaster showed pictures of this natural phenomenon and I thus discovered the correct name for this act of nature: Frost Flowers.

Frost flowers are formed only when certain conditions converge simultaneously. They emerge from plants such as wingstem and iron weed. Frost flowers are spun from freezing air. The soil must be moist or wet, but not frozen and the plant stem not yet reached a frozen state. Water in the plant’s stem is drawn upward from the ground, expands as it freezes on contact with air, more water pushes up through the stem and then forms a ribbon of ice.

Something absolutely exquisite is then formed. In the summer atop this spiny wingstem plant one can see ravishing beauty from the dainty fragile daisy like yellow flower. Fall comes, the flowers fade, and the left-over stem looks dead. But then, at the right time and place, nature transforms something that looks lifeless into something magnificent.

This phenomenon is another amazing way God shows-out through His creation.

The greatest creation God fashions is when a girl or boy, man or woman give their whole self, without restraint or control to God who breathed them into being in the first place. When this happens, transformation begins taking place.

Beauty is being formed.

Unfortunately, we get beat up and scarred along the way in this journey of transformation. Some of this can be our own fault, and some of it through the fault of others. We can find ourselves believing that the transforming work into something beautiful has stopped.

But guess what? My life may be a mess, but it’s a sacred mess. It’s not up to me to take the jumbled, messy, unruly threads of my life and make them into a beautiful finished tapestry. That would be a disaster and would not be worth looking at. However, if I get my eyes off of the scarred and beat up parts of my story, and get my eyes glued onto my heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus, I find that the my wounds get tended to.

The Holy Trinity does transformative surgery on me from the inside out. My barely feeling alive self gets strong again. God continues to spin the conditions of my life into something extraordinary. This is His work, not mine. This may not happen fast, but it does happen, and the transformation of something that looked almost dead comes alive and it is beautiful because God did it, not me.

 Even though there are times in our life when we lose hope that God is still creating a beautifully unique masterpiece, we can always be assured He has not. His fingers are always gently and lovingly weaving the threads, even the unruly and messy threads, into his masterpiece. I rest in His hands because I know that He who began a good work in me will carry it on to completion. (Philippians 1:6)

How can you fix your eyes on Jesus today?

He is your Master Weaver. How can you rest in hands today?