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At the doorway to this last weekend of January, snow covers something like 65% of the United States.
Is your heart set on creating the tallest snowman or the most spectacular snow fort your neighbors have ever seen?
If you’re hoping to challenge some existing records, you’d better get started early and recruit a whole lot of helpers.
That’s because the current Guinness World Record holder for “tallest snowperson” is the Olympia SnowWoman that was created in 2008 in Bethel, Maine. It took an enthusiastic team an entire month and 13 million pounds of the white stuff to build the 122-foot-1-inch monstrosity.
The name “Olympia” seemed a perfect way to honor the state’s three-term U.S. senator, Olympia Snowe.
The SnowWoman’s metrics, considered from any angle, were spectacular. She measured 125 feet at the base. Local school kids and volunteers crafted her fleece hat, which was 48 feet across, along with her eight-foot-long carrot nose, comprised of chicken wire and cheesecloth. She boasted a 130-foot-long scarf, three “buttons” that were actually five-foot-wide truck tires, and eyelashes made from eight pairs of snow skis. Each “arm” was a 30-foot-tall spruce.
When completed, Olympia stood just a few feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty.
Alas, winter doesn’t last forever. Even in Maine. The world’s tallest snowperson eventually melted away, enjoyed these days only by means of thousands of digital photos.
When you think about it, there are plenty of other things in this world that don’t last nearly long enough.
Vacations, for instance.
And birthdays.
That first crush.
And that first surge of “real love,” the one we hoped would last forever.
Your teenage years.
Your twenties.
Your thirties.
You see where this is going: Insert here the chronological decade you have most recently left behind.
Cell phones don’t last long enough.
Nor the batteries that power them.
Laptops.
Razors.
Shoes.
Favorite shirts.
And of course, cars, which seem to exemplify built-in obsolescence.
The French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus searched desperately his entire life for meaning. His atheism prevented him from grounding his hopes in God. Camus ultimately concluded that, for most people, the experience of meaning is wrapped up in our most precious relationships. We cherish the people we love.
But all those we love will pass away. They will melt like snow people in the New England springtime, never to be seen again. The longer we live, the more such losses we will have to endure, robbing us of all sense of meaning.
Camus thus concluded that life is absurd. Humans are born with an unquenchable thirst for wholeness and beauty and meaning and love, but which can never be satisfied.
Everything and everyone we love is destined to melt away.
Or maybe not.
C.S. Lewis observed that our deepest yearnings can indeed be fulfilled – if God is really there:
“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water… If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Scripture declares that there are some things that will never pass away.
People will last forever. Whatever we do for the Lord will never be lost (I Corinthians 15:58). And Jesus told his disciples, shortly before his death, “Heaven and earth will pass away, by my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35).
You might spend this weekend sculpturing a spectacular snowscape.
Or you can invest the next few days in two things that are definitely going to last forever:
God’s Word and the special people that God has brought into your life.