Polaroid picture

 I’m finding the stress of my life cutting into my sleep. I seem to sleep long enough, but I can tell when I wake that I’ve been worrying about my responsibilities all night long.

With no school-aged children at home I often don’t follow weather forecasts. This morning I awoke before six a.m. vexed by a complicated issue. I got up to work on it on my laptop and when I glanced outside after about a half hour, something magical happened.

When I was a little girl I received a Polaroid camera for Christmas. (My granddaughter has a camera with the same technology.) I would take a picture and pull the seemingly blank photo paper from the camera. As I watched, a dim image in black and white would appear and details slowly sharpen before my eyes.

That’s what happened to me this morning. When I sat down at my desk, all seemed the same as yesterday. but at some point I turned my head to glance outside and realized the car seemed different. Peering down at the pre-dawn yard, I saw a blanket of white on my car. Over the next hour, each time I glanced out details of the scene deepened and sharpened into a wintry landscape. In the windless air a dusting of snow covered every maple twig. Since our coachhouse is white with grey trim, my west window framed an old black and white photo with a touch of dull brick in the Greeley Village apartments beyond and to the south a tinge of dusty pink at the office condos peeked through the branches.

David A. Bednar, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke of "the tender mercies of the Lord," small blessings that we can learn to recognize and appreciate in our daily lives. As I sit here, wondering at the beauty that developed before my eyes this morning, it truly is a tender mercy. The stresses remain, the challenges abound, but there is beauty to be seen if I just lift my head and look.