Advent lessons - snowflakes!

(I'm indebted to a sermon by Graham Hodges for the illustration that follows)

Snowflakes fall softly through the air, tumbling and twirling as the wind currents carry them along. We probably all recall in school learning that each one is different. None alike. (More on this later)

In 1865 in a tiny Vermont town, Jericho, there was born a boy who was to live there all his life and who was to make scientists all over the world know about him.
The Bentley family were farmers. When their son. Wilson, the hero of this story, was ten, he asked his father for an unusual gift—a camera outfit costing one hundred dollars.   This was a huge sum for the Bentleys, but they saw how serious their boy was and scraped up the money. Why did he want the camera?

Even at that age, Wilson Bentley had become extremely interested in the beautiful, crystal structure of the snowflake. As a Vermont farm boy he saw plenty of snow, but unlike the other boys, he stopped to do more than make snowballs—he actually examined the flakes under a magnifying glass. He discovered that no two were alike. But just to look was not enough. He wanted to take pictures of them. And so, at the age of ten, he asked for and got a camera outfit with a magnifying system to enlarge the snowflake.

Bentley never left his family's farm. And he used this same camera outfit all of his life. Before he died, many years later, he had photographed some 400,000 snowflakes. Sometimes he photographed dozens in a single day. His record for one day was one hundred flakes, a tremendous amount of work when you consider the great care with which snow crystals must be handled. Everything had to be done just right.

Bentley never made a dime from his work. In fact, his life­-long hobby must have cost him a great deal. But the world became much richer. Scientists all over the world studied his pictures, all taken with his childhood toy on his father's farm.

Why did he do it? Simply because he wanted to. He discovered that a snowflake does not form itself all at once, but gradually grows around a tiny center or nucleus, such as a speck of dust or a microscopic particle of sea salt, high in the air. It grows slowly but with perfect symmetry on all sides; that is, each of its six sides is exactly the same.Bentley proved what men had long suspected: of all the trillions and trillions of snowflakes that fall upon the earth, no two are exactly the same. If you want to see his actual photographs, get the book, Snow Crystals, written by W. A. Bentley and W. J. Humphreys.

With all of the millions of things that God created, isn't it marvelous that He took such care with snowflakes? He definitely could have decided that just one of His designs was the perfect one, and every snowflake could have looked like that, all of them exactly alike.

The Almighty is a powerful, all-knowing, and (hope you don't think I'm sacreligous) imaginative God.  And altogether patient.....
He also made each of us distinctly different from each other. Our looks, our fingerprints, our likes and dislikes....all different. And He is altogether patient.....
Each of us is loved by God, and each of us is in need of a Savior. That Savior is Jesus.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.  (John 3:16-17)

Christmas is man's timing. We celebrate His birth in December, whether it's exactly the authentic timing or not.  God loves you, and made you, just as He makes all the snowflakes that fall in winter. He knows each of us, and loves us anyway.   If you don't yet know Him as your own Savior and Friend, let this Christmas be a time of re-birth in your life! (You can click on the tab on the right-hand side of this page and discover how to be saved.)