We Are Snowmen
What Snowmen Can Teach Us (and Our Families) About Living and Dying
When the time and conditions are right, a maker of snow people emerges from his freshly flocked home and begins to build. He rolls snowballs into huge round mounds, stacks them on top of each other, and sculpts a smiling face. He adds stick arms and a carrot nose to finish it off. The builder puts his hands on his hips with a satisfied sigh as he and his snowman regard one another, smiling.
The builder goes back into his cozy house, knowing that the snowman will not last. The builder knew from the moment he began to roll the first crumbling chunk of snow around the yard that the snowman would not be there to watch fireworks with him on the Fourth of July. The maker never intended his frozen friend to last.
A snowman is built for a certain season. So it is with us. We are fitted into mortal bodies by a Maker who knows we will not last. At least not here—not in these mounds of bone and blood that break and bruise, sag and slump, and eventually collapse in death. We are here on leave. We are snow people purposely nestled into a temporary existence where the temperature of time is always wearing us away.
As life persists for some and ends for others, it becomes clear that clinging to mortal life as if it is the only season our souls will experience is as futile an effort as a snowman trying to survive the summer. Our attempts to arrest the effects of time by means of blush, body wraps, and Botox are equivalent to a fretting snowman setting out box fans to keep himself cool in the springtime. We will succumb to the heat eventually.
The problem with us is that, too often, we fear the wrong kind of melting. We fear mortal death and all the uncomfortable declines that go with it. But the decline of the body is not our foe. In fact, it is the inevitable melting itself that forces us to realize that we are not in a place of permanence and, that being the case, we had better get down to real living while we can.
Morose Snowmen & Living Forever
But is knowing that our snowman life will end such a sad and terrible thing? There are two great sadnesses in death: The sadness of missing someone who dies, and the sadness of lost opportunities. The first sadness cannot be fully soothed in mortality because we love as eternal beings, beyond our mortal shackles. But the second sadness, that of opportunities lost, is ours to reckon with. That is one reason we are not made to last forever: so that we will be motivated to seize the moments of life while they last. Existing in a timed test urges us—without exactly forcing us—to act. To choose.
I have never known a morose snowman. Snowmen are not worried that they were made to survive only a certain season and neither should we be. Because, incredibly, for us there is a way to become an un-meltable, un-perishable person who can endure forever.
God’s Son himself showed us this. His perishable self was carried down from the cross, but he rose up three days later fully physically intact. The physicality of the Son of God is established in the accounts of Jesus’ return from death to eat fish and honeycomb and to let his disciples touch his hands and feet and side. Yet he is also immortal, meaning he is exempt from death, having already succumbed to it, and emerged from it with his physical body and his spirit now fused forever. Never to die again. In other words, he conquered death.
But how can this be? How can there be a snowman, a person, that doesn’t melt? To live and not to die? We do not understand such a thing—yet. First, we must learn to die. Then we will understand how to live forever.
For now, it falls to each of us to become either disgruntled snowmen who curse God and wish to die while yet still struggling to stop ourselves from melting, or far-sighted snowmen who act in faith now and look forward with an eye of faith, trusting in the wise Maker who created us at first and who has promised to make us again, immortal at last.
My husband, my son, and their snowman—who is no longer with us :)