I started tracking a potentially huge snowstorm last Friday, checking in at weather.com at regular intervals to see if this storm might be the big one. By Sunday I reached an emotional tipping point. The possibility of this being a great snowstorm was high – not definite, of course, but high. I committed myself to team snow.

So, with heart already invested, I did more research – checking out various websites and even discovering a video weather blogger of some interest at Accuweather. It wasn’t that I was spending hours in front of the computer – one can only look at weather sites for so long. It was that I started hoping. I envisioned snow deep enough that my daughter Livvy would wake up in the morning and see and not know what to do with – something that would awe her. I imagined my big, furry, Newfoundland dog Samantha romping around in it and then falling asleep in a pile somewhere, happy that the ‘good weather’ had finally arrived. Pictures of the whole family sitting in front of the fire sipping hot chocolate were already playing memory-like in my head. Suffice it to say that expectations were high.

Then, as always tends to happen, the blizzard fizzled for the Washington, DC area and what we got instead was sleet and freezing rain and just enough snow to hint at what a real storm might have looked like. Kim has to go to work in the horrible mush and I need to head to my little office too. There won’t be any family fires today – instead we will struggle against this weather.

All of this lead me to ask God at about 5am this morning, when I snuck a hopeful look outside to see if maybe the blizzard had come after all, why I felt this raging disappointment. It isn’t rational for a nearly 40-year-old man to be that disappointed by a lack of snow. But I was. I was horribly disappointed and sad. In a way I felt silly for hoping for snow like some little kid. In another way I felt silly for having deep hopes at all – after all, deep hopes tend lead to only one thing, disappointment. And so God and I talked for a few minutes before I fell back to sleep. The only problem with the conversation from my perspective is that it was one-sided. I didn’t hear anything back from God about this whole hope/expectation/disappointment thing. I still haven’t. I’ll let you know when I do.