Olympic organisers were forced to deploy “thousands” of staff to clear real snow off slopes that they had spent millions of pounds covering in man-made stuff in the first place. The Zhangjiakou and Yanqing mountain clusters where almost all skiing and snowboarding events are taking place (Big Air being the exception) have very little natural snow due to their dry climate.

It meant the Chinese organising committee were forced to use snow machines for months in advance of the event to create white strips on the brown mountains for the world’s Winter Olympians to compete on, officially using around 185 million litres of water.

Nevertheless, Beijing organisers had to deploy emergency teams during the winter olympics to shovel natural snow that had fallen, off the slopes.

The BBC reported that one of the issues was the molecular composition of the artificial snow compared to the natural snow. Ski technicians use wax for skis and this is adjusted to create speed for the straight races and grip for slaloms. With the mixing of the two snows some found this difficult with skiers performing either better or worse than expected. Another aspect of the problem was the two snows not mixing but creating adhesion problems.

Looking at this, I saw how a move of God can be impacted by our own attempts to create a move artificially. The mixture of both can produce a legacy that is difficult to manage, such as Ishmael being a product of Abraham’s impatience. The impact of the expected can also result in the need to clear away what is not needed but because of the mixing that takes place it can be difficult to discern what is genuine and what is not.

Can we wait for the genuine? In terms of anything that we feel God has promised us, can we wait patiently or do we force the issue. We must remain focussed on what we know that God has said to us, so that the genuine when it comes is received on virgin soil.

The other aspect is the waste of resources and energy in creating something that is not real, as well as the impact of the artificial on the church, society, etc.