It snowed last night!” I said to my husband, Kevin, as I looked out the back window of our cabin. A fresh, unstained carpet waited to be explored under the whitened boughs of ponderosa pines in northern Arizona.
Our dog, Mollie, pounced in the nearest snowdrift as we pulled on hats and mitts, zipping up jackets in the twenty-five-degree morning. Nose to the ground, she followed a trail of rabbit tracks, easily identified by the leapfrogging trail left in the snow made by their long back feet landing slightly ahead of their front. Under the chatter of a mountain chickadee, Mollie sniffed out a mouse trail next.
“What is this?” I wondered, bending closer to examine a path of four-toed prints much smaller than Mollie’s. With tiny claw marks visible on some of the tracks, I figured they were canine. “Looks like a fox,” Kevin said. “There’s been a pair in the area.”
Back at the cabin, I checked my email—still no results from a recent mammogram. Even as a fourteen-year breast cancer survivor, I still struggled with “scanxiety” and jumping to worst-case scenarios. “Give me Your peace,” I breathed in prayer, closing my laptop.
Later we went exploring again. The slight breeze and sunlight had distorted the fox tracks, so they appeared much larger than before. If we had not seen the footprints at the beginning of the day, we could easily have thought a wolf had moved into the neighborhood, lurking in the deep shadows while we slept.
I took a deep breath and thanked God for the lesson of the fox tracks and for keeping me from jumping to all kinds of worst-case scenarios.
Jesus, while I wait in the long season of winter, guard my heart from distorting realities into something bigger than they are.
—Lynne Hartke
