As I sit on my porch looking at flowers in full bloom, it seems hard to remember that the same scene was covered with snow just a few months ago. It was the snowiest winter on record in my area and my favorite. No, I'm not usually fond of winter, but this past winter was a special one.

Let me back up a little. After a terrible winter a little over two years ago, I felt I'd better pray about the situation. The bad weather had made me feel pretty depressed. Some days I felt as if I were just surviving until springtime. Although winter would be recurring every year, I knew gloomy, sluggish, or dreary thinking didn't need to.

I feel strongly that God is all good, so if something in my life seems terrible, I can pray about it. God, Soul, knows nothing about partial goodness mixed with dreariness. He knows and provides infinite good.

Through prayer about the winter blues, I learned more of my spiritual nature, which is not bound by material seasons or limited in any way. Every day is an expression of perfect, complete, immaculate Soul, of God's radiant reality. I stopped thinking of a day as composed of a limited number of minutes between sunup and sundown that included some moments of joy, but in the winter, lots of confinement and lack of inspiration. Science and Health gave me a spiritual understanding of day by explaining it in these terms: "The irradiance of Life; light, the spiritual idea of Truth and Love" (p. 584).

I had plenty of time to pray before the next winter season. I was expecting my third child and had put aside time for such effort. During that time, I acknowledged my perfection as an idea of God, not limited, confined, or restricted in any way. I prayed to trust God more completely with every detail of my life, large or small. I was also becoming more patient with myself and others. Little by little I was becoming more conscious of God's loving presence always with me.

Right after our baby arrived, winter came in with a bang. Instead of shivering and sulking, I felt uplifted, full of hope from all of the prayerful work I had done. Even as the news reports described terrible weather conditions, I felt deep gratitude for and confidence in God's abundant goodness toward everyone, including our family.

Each day offered new promises of joy, beauty, peace, and inspiration. God's perfection is always present, always good. Christ Jesus' teachings don't say or imply that the kingdom of heaven is at hand when the weather's good but it's put on hold when the weather is bad!

Although I spent a good deal of time indoors, I never felt housebound or trapped. Nor, when I did need to get out with my little family in tow, did I see that as a problem. I enjoyed the fresh air and shoveling the snow. We were always safe and able to complete any tasks we needed to do. I felt a sense of eternal springtime each day. I knew this consciousness came from feeling close to God, divine Love. Christ Jesus expressed this closeness when he said, "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30). He knew that God's love is not close at some times but distant at others. God's goodness never fluctuates.

Science and Health assures us, "The periods of spiritual ascension are the days and seasons of Mind's creation, in which beauty, sublimity, purity, and holiness—yea, the divine nature—appear in man and the universe never to disappear" (p. 509).

In truth, each of us is the spiritual idea of Mind, God. We are never for an instant subject to material conditions that sometimes can make us happy and other times make us depressed. God's goodness, His eternal springtime, is a state of consciousness that can't be hindered by any material conditions. God's love is so great—in fact, all-powerful—there couldn't be a moment or a situation that could separate us from Him.

Each day presents opportunities to see God's goodness and love in the smallest and largest details of our lives, to feel the warmth of His love, even in the coldest winter.