As winter wears on in the upper Midwest and snow lingers on the sleeping earth, I continue to enjoy walking and hiking through the silence it spreads across the land.  In the velvet stillness of winter, I see things that in warmer months I might not.
     So it was a few weeks ago as I was hiking through a stretch of forest not too far from my home that I came upon a rock, a large rock sitting serenely in the snow.  I knew the rock well.  Many years before, while my wife and I were hiking through the same forest with our daughter, we stopped at this rock.  We took a photograph of our daughter sitting on the rock, smiling, beaming in the sunlight of early summer.
     As I stood in the snow by the rock, I remembered that moment, remembered our daughter's smile, remembered the joy on our faces, the joy of the day, the joy of being a family, the joy of simply being alive to revel in such a wondrous existence.  And I realized that although I had felt in that moment, in an indescribable way, God's mystery and presence, I also realized that in the silence of the snow now before me I touched it more clearly.
     Sometimes God is silent, sometimes he is not.  Yet we hear him best when our landscapes are silent.  It's easy to think about God in the summer, in a season of abundance and plenty, but we see him more clearly when we're standing in the aphonia of a somnolent land.