What have you been doing this winter? We may imagine ourselves curling up in soft and warm fleece blankets with our feet tucked into a pair of cozy red and black plaid slippers. In our hands would be an aromatic cup of tea or a delicious cup of hot chocolate perhaps overflowing with whipped cream or spiced with peppermint or cinnamon. Nearby on a table would be a plate of warm cookies and milk or our favorite sandwich next to an amazing page turner novel. Additionally, on our big screen television would be a stream of never-ending entertainment enticing us to binge watch on those long dark evenings that stretch off into our long uninterrupted months of pure winter leisure….
But that sort of glorious winter hibernation is frequently found only in our imaginations. Instead, we live in the reality of West Michigan! Not many days ago, the winds whipped throwing stars of snowflakes horizontally through every crack and crevice of our homes. The arctic cold was like a hatchet to our lungs as snowdrifts surrounded and seized our vehicles, denying us our attempts to make two-track trails through our neighborhoods. We slipped and contorted our bodies into awkward sculptural poses as we tried to balance and maneuver ourselves across skating rink parking lots while trying to complete our essential tasks. And we cannot forget the shoveling! The blizzard just howled with laughter at us as we attempted and failed over and over again to subdue their incredible power with our inconsequential little manmade tools of plastic and wood.
Our actual lives frequently do not match up to our hopes and our imagined expectations. We make promises and vows, dreaming a happily ever after with someone only to end up in arguments and in therapy. The phone rings and instead of a joyful message, it is a grim report of serious health problems. The news does not seem to ever lift our spirits: war, death, inflation, political fights and gridlock reports constantly bleed across our screens. We constantly must swipe them away into our digital trash bins like so many uncounted tears.
Yet despite all of our dashed dreams and reality calls, our lives are anchored by some very irrefutable facts: we are all known and we are all loved by God through our savior Jesus Christ. All of us, each and every one of us: gay or straight, black or white, bi or queer, enabled or disabled, broke or well off; we are not living our lives alone. God is with us, whether we acknowledge the presence of God or not. God is reaching out to us on those cold frosty nights to warm our souls with God’s eternal unearned love. As we trudge through another Michigan winter this year, ricocheting between green days of grass and those days simply whited out of our calendars, I pray that we will all remember that we are not alone during the long dark winter hours ahead of us. For our God is with us, through all the seasons of our life. Amen.
Article in Rockford Squire Newspaper January 2023