For a storm named after a cute, quirky teenager, Juno turned out to be pretty vicious. Last week’s blizzard buried parts of the east coast in up to three feet of snow, flooded many coastal towns, and generated wind gusts of 78mph in some locations. Every now and then a major storm like Juno comes along and creates serious problems for the people living in its path, especially the homeless who are always affected disproportionately by extreme weather. When such catastrophic storms are looming, we all do well to heed the warnings of safety officials and take the necessary precautions.

However, it doesn’t take a historic blizzard to get most of us out of sorts. A slightly icy road and one impatient driver are all the ingredients needed to ruin a lot of people’s day (not to mention their vehicles). Less dramatically, at some point we’ve all found ourselves in a foul mood on account of having to dig out our cars, shovel the pathway yet again, or simply having to get into a cold car for the drive to work.

Sitting at home this past week watching the snow come down seemingly without end, the thought occurred to me that perhaps my own griping about the winter weather is not totally warranted. Perhaps, I thought, the problem is not so much with the snow as it is with my attitude about it. Why do we get so worked up over the winter weather? When you get right down to it, it’s because it interferes with our plans. It adds time to our commute. It freezes our pipes. It forces us out into the cold when we’d rather be snuggling up with a book or getting a few extra minutes of sleep.

But what happens when we take of the distorting lens of our own desires and see the snow for what it is? Think about a time when the snow was coming down and you didn’t have to be anywhere or worry about clearing it away immediately. How did it look then? It was actually quite beautiful, right? The flakes float gently down from the sky and settle without a sound upon piles of sparkling white. A pearly white blanket settles upon roofs and treetops, lending a picturesque quality to the landscape. How marvelous to consider that, of all those countless flakes piling up by the inch and the foot, every one bears its own unique crystallized pattern. Every flake is an exquisite work of art, and we have piles and piles of them!

I think if Jesus had lived on the American east coast instead of the shores of Galilee, we might very well have a parable about snowflakes instead of mustard seeds: To what shall we compare the reign of God. It is like a snowflake that, falling along with another and then another, soon grows into a mighty snowdrift where all the children come to sled.

All this is to say that so much depends on how you look at it. We can see the very same snow as a burden or as a joy depending on our desires and concerns of the moment. The same is true of many things in life. The next-door neighbor, the conversation in the break room, the lack of anything good on TV—the things we tend to view as curses may very well be blessings that we have simply failed to recognize as such.

This holds true even for two things that people in our culture tend to treat like absolute evils—pain and death. Many of us have an inordinate fear of death, which leads to strange behavior in some cases—excessive dieting and exercise, unnecessary cosmetic surgery, extreme medical measures at life’s end. Now don’t get me wrong—I would not make light of pain and death. We all struggle with these facts of human existence, even the most secure among us. My point is simply that, because we look at them purely as disruptions of our plans and pleasure seeking, we miss the grace and beauty to be found in those occasions when we find ourselves in need. Often these are the moments when God breaks through all the distractions in our lives and we recognize most clearly how much our friends and family care for us.

A heart-wrenching scene in the film Calvary, which recently came out on DVD, touches upon this point in a poignant way. The film’s protagonist, a Catholic priest, sits in a darkened chapel with a woman who has been widowed just hours before. If anyone has a right to complain about the calamity of her situation, it’s her. But she doesn’t say what we’d expect. She tells the priest, no, it’s not unfair that her husband died so young. They loved each other, and they had a good life together. What’s unfair is that there are so many people in the world who never experience love the way they did.

We might feel that it’s unfair that we should get snowed in on the day we were supposed to go out for a romantic date or that we have to get out the shovel again when a big deadline is approaching… and it is too bad. But to always focus on the things getting in the way of our narrow plans is to miss out on the virtually unlimited store of beauty and joy around us at any given moment. (Just think of all those beautiful snowflakes.) This kind of narrow thinking is especially dangerous when we come to see other people as obstacles and inconveniences. We might not want to take the time to talk with the chatty cashier any more than we want to scrape ice off the car when we’re running late, but the simple willingness to see that person for the gift they are might make the difference between trudging through a mess of negative emotions all day and walking through a day filled with one blessing after the next. The potential for both lies in every day. Which we experience depends largely on the attitude we bring.