The autumn of 2005 is busy giving birth to the loveliest winter, alternating her sunny, windless days with unpredictable ones full of cold gusts and low, grey-white clouds that loiter moodily, threatening to break open. On her wide-open days the pleasure nearly gets out of hand, as the mornings lay themselves down pleasingly and at full length across the valley in the loose embrace of a merciful winter sun, its faint kiss on everything.

Her swelling belly becomes the reservoir of soft drizzle and steady sifting rain, winding its way down from Groenberg and the Hawekwas into the cheerful, chattering little streams, Krom and Dwars.

To the beat of her regular heartbeats, which set the pace for change, the vineyards and orchards begin, in stately fashion, to shift their colour schemes towards a more sober brown and rust, while the natural optimists prefer orange and yellow.

As the temperature outside the sheltered womb drops, the birth-pangs become palpably sharper, until the child lies naked and uncovered, ready to brave the scouring of cold and wind and sunless rain.

What looks to the human observer like a miscarriage is a perfect occasion for God to press His stamp of goodness upon. He himself feeds and suckles this stillborn thing, stripped of all dignity. He is the One who, through wild dark nights of storm-rain and wind, cradles it in His fatherly arms against His chest. He is the One who, in His mercy, closes up every twisted and wrenched branch again with new life and stately dignity. He is the One who wakes the sleeping reptiles and sends the little swallows to read their compass. He is the One who stirs a deep yearning in the weaver-birds and the doves, so that with endless patience and care they build their little nests, knowing their young will live.

There is nothing in our spirit or in our circumstances so stripped bare that a merciful God cannot raise it again to new life and new meaning. We accept easily all that is negative when it comes our way. But it takes a deliberate decision of will and feeling to keep expecting and receiving the good.

We need only bring every stillborn or martyred situation before God and stand back in joyful expectancy, to see how He presses the stamp of His wonder — in lavish love — everywhere we, against all hope, had hoped for it. That is what the winter teaches us.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer