Oh, one of those.

It's one of those nights. Cold, winter feeling. All that. The day started out just like so many other Saturdays this quarter. Laying around, not really wanting to do anything. I'm fine with that. Eventually I did get some stuff done (like packing all my belongings).

But then the temperature dropped. My plans of walking around in the afternoon, or even the remove possibility of going out for a little run faded gave way to my desire to stay healthy (ha, by not running...) and visit friends. The cold air didn't change my day too much, but it had an impact.

But then it started to snow. As the tiny sandgrain sized flakes began to fall to the streets in the cold, Bellingham rapidly took on a different look. Usually snowfall is eagerly anticipated by thousands of Western Washington University students. I remember being in that place; the anticipation of whether or not classes would be canceled, the excessive calling of the snow line, and the eventual caving to play late into the evening and early morning in the snow with friends whether there was school or not.

This snowfall is different for me. I'm not a student anymore, so I'm not really waiting for anything to be canceled. Most students have returned home by this point after finishing their finals, so I don't even feel the spillover from them. This snowfall, it's just me. Just me and some friends.

3 inches, maybe less. That's all. But that's also all that it takes. Snow has always had a strange power to change a community. Pre-existing plans and obligations get canceled, people come outside their houses and play, friends stop by to see if you'd care to join them. Complete strangers ask if they can borrow your sleds for a quick run down the hill, and you let them with no hesitation. We find ourselves in neighbor's houses later on that we hadn't met until this point. Community looks different when our ability to transport ourselves and build schedules is hindered by a mere 3 inches of white snow.

I realize that I keep saying it looks "different" which I think has something to do with my training in foreign countries that things are "never bad, just different". I've repeated that with people, used it to help myself be open to other cultures, and heard it said a thousand ways. 

But for today, I'm willing to say that having the snow on the ground was better. I was in better, more complete, community because of it. With that said, it wouldn't be healthy to have the snow on the ground all the time. I'd probably become some kind of hermit.

But good or bad, different or the same, this is one of those nights. A day that started out as completely ordinary and was transformed into something I couldn't have forseen. I couldn't have forseen it because the start place seemed an unlikely place to start for such an extravagant ending, and on top of that, the end was something different than I could have arranged on my own.

In a bigger way than my musing about snow changed communities, this is a season about the ordinary and unlikely becoming extrordinary. Advent is a time that we sit waiting in expectation for the coming of Jesus Christ, a new king, that would come into this world in the most ordinary, unlikely, way for a king.

This is one of those nights.