The rain came in, starting with just a sprinkle while we were tending to the horses yesterday morning. Over the next several hours, it varied from light showers to moderately heavy. We expected it to continue that way—based on the forecast—all day.

On my way back to the house, I read a text from a close friend that the adult daughter of mutual friends had been murdered.

I felt sadness and gloom clench my heart like the grip of Winter personified. Cold, gray, bleak, barren. Breakfast coffee held no flavor and there was no savoring of toast and butter. Just the mechanics of taking sustenance. Even the jalapeño in the cranberry jelly barely registered.

But in mid-afternoon, the rain eased up and the overcast blanket began to rip open. Around two-thirty, the sun cut through the clouds. Black branches suspended heavy beads of rain that sparkled in the light. As I looked down the slope of our driveway, across the road and Whitten’s pasture, I could see Boos’ woods lining the creek and rising up the hill. Wells of mist billowed up from the wet sod and along Peter’s Creek. It looked like a scene from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.

The heat of sudden sun shining into saturated air chilled by rain birthed a blossoming of drifting fog. It sieved up through dark branches, rose slightly through the trees, weaved its way through the narrow valley. Through the woods, bright shafts of light alternated with visible shadows of trunks lightly etched on the sifting canvas of mist, images suspended in space between stone and sky, soil and thin branches.

Beyond the bluffs, miles away from the winter stand of native hardwoods that seam the ditches and valley, sun gleamed on billowing clouds of the passing front, burnishing them with an almost blinding white witness in the surrounding blueness of a Kansas sky.

I walked for a while, shuffling through wet grass toward Whitten’s pasture, took some pictures of the mist. In less than fifteen minutes, it was gone. Another passing, another brief interlude of beauty filtering through the dullness. I looked east and west, studying the lines and textures of the creek bottom, this small valley cut by eons of seasonal rains, bound by hardwood hills, and bordered by shorn fields after the autumn harvest.

In the brightness of such interlude, I welcomed the brief lifting of mood. In both beauty and tragedy, we walk in the wetness of passing storms, our steps forming brief marks on heavy sod. And even when our seeing is hazed by tears, remembering the nearness of Him Who Loves Us. His Spirit reminding us that our Lord and Savior walked upon this same earth, trod stony paths, and sacrificed His own life rather than surrender us to the Darkness.

Someday—by faith’s power—I know that we will look back even at such dark hours, and know that they were nothing more than mists across the valley. But for now, we will grieve and weep and seek the soothing of our souls with groanings too deep for words. And remember that He wept at the grief of friends, even though knowing that He would raise Lazarus from the dead.