A sudden blizzard is coming.
The words hit me on January 9, 2024, in the stillness of early morning. I grabbed a pen and recorded them in my journal. I sat, examining the sentence from all angles. What does it mean? I asked. And Jesus overturned the tables in the temple.
I shared the words with a friend—the vision too. A beat of silence before her response, and I imagined her filing it away in her heart for later.
On February 14, I walked with Husband through the neighborhood. The dry, sunny day spun away, color drained from the late-afternoon sky, and snow zinged us. Where had the tiny storm come from so fast? Sudden blizzard. But it was foreshadowing and not the real one—this time.
On the night of March 16, I had a dream. Hundreds of people gathered on craggy red rocks, the uneven terrain circling a lovely swimming area hundreds of feet below us. Twisting paths descended to aqua waters, and hikers threaded their way down to swim. Laughter, picnics, outdoor games. I sat on a ledge at the top near a mama with her toddler. She dangled her legs over the precipice, and her baby squirmed in her arms, trying to free himself. She laughed, loosening her hold on him, and my stomach dropped.
“He could fall over the edge,” I said, “and if he does, he’ll die.”
My sharp response surprised me, but I spoke the truth.
The wind whipped into a frenzy, the temperature plummeted, and I spied a person, dressed in winter gear and encrusted in snow, trudging over the now hardened aqua waters people had splashed in minutes earlier. Icicles hung from his body in a slant, the winds having frozen them sideways.
The ice would break under the man’s weight—I just knew it. Not the amount of time needed to freeze the lake solid enough to walk on. But even as I worried, I somehow knew the ice was at least a foot thick, and no one would crash through it. My dream ended.
The next day, I told the nighttime story to my friend.
“So, a sudden blizzard?” she said.
She had remembered the words from January, and now I did too.
Weather reports say we should expect snow tonight. After the mildest, driest Minnesota winter I can remember, the forecast interests me. But that’s not the sudden blizzard I know is coming.
Many of us have lived through blizzards. The Halloween Blizzard of ‘91, September 11, the pandemic of 2020, and personal storms that threatened to rip us to pieces. Before each of those, we sat on the rocky edge, swinging our legs, the aqua waters far below tempting us to swim.
A sudden blizzard is coming.
We can’t see, but we can perceive—and prepare.
Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on the rock.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.