My Tuesday schedule allows me time to take a weekly run around Central Park in the late afternoon.  The runs lately, in the dead of winter, have varied from difficult to treacherous.  Last Tuesday blew them all out of the water.

Snow had fallen all day, but not the fun fluffy kind.  Instead, we got the fat, wet flakes that splatter onto your clothing and hit the ground like rain.  There’s no pretty white scenery accompanying this kind of snowfall; it’s just a cold drenching of the city.  I decided to run anyway, preferring a damp fleece to a boring treadmill.  But when I came out of the gym ten minutes after entering it to change and headed toward the park, conditions had worsened. Seriously?! Seriously.  The fat wet flakes were icier and sticking to the ground.  I arrived at 60th and 5th to the park like I’d never seen it: completely white, from the tops of the trees to the roads and sidewalks.  It appeared that my mission, should I choose to accept it, would be to run in inch-deep, slippery snow.  I considered heading back to the gym, where I would have to face the “I told you so” glance of the girl at the front desk who had shaken her head in disbelief when I left, not to mention a treadmill run in skin-tight, long-sleeved Under Armor.  But most importantly, turning back would mean letting the snow win.  And New Yorkers do not let terrorists win.  So I ran.

Let me tell you, that run was a bitch-slap to the face.  Dodging tourists and pot smokers, careening on patches of ice while my ankles curved in dangerous and possibly unallowable directions, feeling snow hit my face and melt then freeze again and gather on my eyelashes and block my view, all while the wind did a dance of mockery around my contorted, trying-to-stay-upright body.  Winter, I am so done with you, I thought as I finally reached the park’s entrance, uninjured but clinging with raw hands to the thin line between discomfort and pain.

And then I got back to the gym and that girl wasn’t even at the front desk for me to give her my “I told you so” look.

Though I usually walk home from 59th and Park, I left the gym on this day and headed straight to the subway.  Along with everyone else in Manhattan.  The platform was packed and I used that fact as motivation to curse winter, and everyone around me.  I thought about how raw and angry I’ve felt the past few weeks, walking down the street each day with a thick layer of Under Armor wrapped around my heart to keep me from seeing people as anything other than obstacles in my path, justifying my bad attitude with the “It’s February in New York” excuse and nursing a garden of disdain that flourishes especially in the cold but will soon overrun every other season if I don’t get a handle on it.  Because winter, I know, is not the ultimate source of this ugliness in me.  And spring is not the Ultimate Source of its dissipation.

So I got on the next train and held on to my section of the metal strap.  A second later, I heard my name with a question mark behind it coming from the girl next to me.  I felt that jumbled moment of weirdness whenever I randomly see someone I know in this huge city.  Then I woke up back in reality and realized I was going to have to have a real conversation with someone.  And I turned to her.

This girl whom I had met once at a volunteer event and with whom I am friends on Facebook proceeded to tell me her name and then inform me of everything going on in my life.  “You’re engaged, right?  And moving to Atlanta?  And you were in LA around the time of the National Championship?”  Wow.  Facebook really does its job.  We continued a conversation from 59th Street to 28th, and in that distance and matter of minutes I listened as this girl opened up to me in a way even the internet can’t approach.  She talked about how she had left New York and was visiting and how that felt.  She talked about the things she had learned about life and herself while she was here.  She talked about mistakes she had made and how through them she had known God in a way she never could have otherwise.  She talked about how much she loved Him and how that makes her who she is.  I wavered between being annoyed with and impressed by her vulnerability.  Until I admitted to myself that she sounded just like me when I’m at my most honest.

All I did was take the train to get a fast and warm ride home, and what I ended up getting was a glimpse into someone’s soul.  A soul very similar to mine, it turned out. Warmth from another person, even on one of the many days when I didn’t have much of it myself.  Sometimes grace creeps in quietly, a pocket of warmth on a cold day or a flicker of light in the midst of darkness.  Other times it barges in violently, a loss you think you can’t survive or a wound you think will never heal.  The warmth takes longer to reach you and the light seems to keep getting swallowed by the darkness.  But no matter how long the winter, there is one thing I know–even if I have to remind myself of it most days:  Like spring, grace always shows up. Sometimes I just need better vision, or a different way home, to see it.