When I picture God's rejoicing over his people with singing, I think of Snowflake Bentley. Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, a New England farmer born in 1865, couldn't get enough of snowflakes. For forty years, he ran around in the snow, raucously joyful, catching snowflakes on chilled slides and photographing them, seeking to capture for others the beauty he saw in those one-of-a-kind masterpieces of frozen crystals. Over his lifetime, he photographed more than five thousand individual snowflakes. His notes were effusive: "No. 785 is so rarely beautiful." He wrote of the "feast of [their] beauty."

As I imagine Snowflake careening in the snow, giddy with joy, I marvel with the psalmist, "LORD, what are human beings that you care for them, mere mortals that you think of them? They are like a breath; their days are like a fleeting shadow" (Psalm 144:3-4). I'm like a vanishing, vaporous breath, and God cares for me.