Some thought, lessons, and/or reflections from the day:

• With a day off for Martin Luther King Jr Day, we took a brief excursion to Starved Rock State Park in Illinois to watch and photograph bald eagles.
• Six inches of snow overnight made for a beautiful walk first thing in the morning.
• I guess I ended the day in the hole . . . my Garmin says I climbed 58 flights of stairs during the day and descended 67 flights.  Not sure how that figures.
• For me, going down stairs takes much less effort than going up.
• Making the effort to climb the stairs took me to higher ground where my view was greatly improved.
• Our journey through life will require more work if we are to walk on higher ground but the eternal views will be worth it.
• You can’t walk through fresh snow without leaving a trail.
• The trail we leave in life will lead those who follow it to wherever we are headed.  Where are you going?
• The eagles flock to locations such as Starved Rock because the dam across the river keeps an area of open water all winter where they can fish.  Do you and I go out of our way, if necessary, to make sure we are being fed through God’s Word?
• While the snow provides an element of beauty to a bleak landscape, it can also hide a dangerous layer of ice that could make us fall.  
• Not everything is at it appears.  What looks good on the surface may actually be covering something dangerous that could lead to our downfall.
• God says to “test the spirits” so we would reject what is evil and cling to what is good.  I believe the “testing” he wants us to do is more than just a casual glance at what things look like on the surface.
• We saw several frozen waterfalls . . . at least they looked frozen from a distance.  While they appeared to be solid ice, and one of them even had people climbing it, when you were close you could hear the water still running through it.
• What’s running inside a person may not be obvious if you only look at the hardness of what is outside.
• Today’s photo is of one of the many staircases I ascended and descended throughout the day as the park was full of canyons and overlooks.