Another New Year's Day. Heather...
Illustration
Another New Year's Day. Heather sat in silence watching through her kitchen window as the new year dawned. The brightness of snow-covered night faded slowly into day's full light as the sun's first rays crept soundlessly over the horizon's distant rim. The world upon which Heather looked out was not the same as that to which she had bid farewell the night before. Yesterday's world had been a semi-solid mush of mud after too many days and nights of steady rain. Now it was transformed, shrouded in a white blanket that revealed little of the "real" world underneath. That thought sent Heather's mind off on a speculative tangent. "Just how real is the world underneath the snow?" she wondered. "After all," she thought, "I can't see it. How do I know it's mud and muck? Maybe it's frozen ..." "What is real, anyway?" she silently asked herself. "Everything I can see is shaped and shaded by my own experience. What I see outside this window may be entirely different from that which someone else would see. For that matter, I could look out myself tomorrow and see it all differently. So, what is 'real'?" Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe what was important was that Heather recognized the potential newness of each moment of each day. Perhaps reality -- or truth -- lay in the understanding that creation is a continuous process of change. The more Heather became aware, the more she herself would be changed, becoming herself a new creation, with each new understanding drawing her ever nearer to the Creator. -- Fannin
