Let it snow

Snow, snow and more snow! I love it so much. Everything is totally white and clean and bright and blanketed in about a foot of it. Everything is cancelled, everything is still and quiet, neighbors are out shovelling and some brave souls are trying to drive. I am still stuck in Burnaby, of course. I tried to drive out to Langley last night but one of the chains came off my car tire and then after skidding my way around for about 20 minutes I gave up and went back to Mom and Dad's to spend the night. I'm going to try again today, hopefully I make it!

Snow is amazing. In every handful there is a billion beautiful crystal structures that rival the finest architecture or the most intricate lace, yet as soon as a little heat touches it, the crystal structure is disrupted and the water transitions into a chaotic, disordered state we call liquid. All that beauty, gone! The interesting thing about snow crystals/snow flakes is that they are a perfect mix of kinetic and thermodynamic considerations. On the one hand, the formation of snow crystals from chaotic liquid to a very ordered structure is thermodynamically unfavorable in that the entropy of the system decreases. (For non chemistry/physics people, this means they get MORE orderly instead of LESS orderly, which violates the principles of thermodynamics and the way the universe generally works.)
On the other hand, it is kinetically very favorable for snow crystals to form, because in their ordered state they are in a place of lower energy, which of course is a great thing. (I follow this principle all the time in my human kinetics class: the less energy I have to expend, the better!)

However, besides the great example of thermodynamic and kinetic push-and-pull, I think by far the most wonderful thing about snow is how transitory the beauty is. If I was God, would I be willing to make something so incredibly intricate and beautiful, and then just allow it to dissolve away in a matter of seconds? All that work for nothing?
The question is, does God create beautiful things just for the sake of creating them, whether or not humans will actually appreciate them, or whether or not they serve some great useful purpose?
I remember the first time I saw a snowflake up close enough to see the actual structure of it. It was an emotional experience, as if I was suddenly a spectator of something so much bigger than myself and I was looking through a window into another universe. I lay on the snow contemplating that the one flake I held in my hand was one of billions and billions of others, yet God cared enough about it to make it so amazing and to let me see it. God, you're really the amazing one!