Warmth

a devotional for a cold snap

First: A Brief, Grateful Message

Before we head into today’s devotional, I just want to express my deepest appreciation for the incredible outpouring of love and support I received on last Thursday’s parable. Between the comments, the encouragements, the commiserations, the emails, the coins in my tip jar, the restacks, the shares…my goodness, folks. What a welcome for my new style of post. I’m truly amazed.  

Experiments are scary—vulnerable experiments even more so—but I can’t express how heartening it felt to be so held and loved by all of you last week as I tried something new with a higher degree of honesty than ever before. 

I often contend that I have the best readership of any writer anywhere. It may be hard to prove, but moments like last Thursday feel like incontrovertible evidence.

Thank you, all.

And now, on with the devotional…

---

Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

while the frost descends upon the lawn
the flame-haired saint sits hearth-close
and spins, 
sings, 
weaves a tale of someday-spring

and none of us believe her;
not me, not the dog, not the husband who makes and brings 
the kindling
no; 

we’ve felt the lie of winter’s end, before
and we know in our bones
there is no warmth in the soil.

but

the flame-haired saint laughs, 
crackling sparks, chimney hum
and carries on her hymns of fire
undaunted:

she knows, she knows! 

the embers whisper in their ashes
long after we’ve gone
to bed. 

Over the weekend, our region descended into a potentially-historic cold snap, with a handful of crisp dry days in the teens. 

True, other places certainly get colder on a regular basis, but it’s all relative, isn’t it? Weather extremes are different when you’re not used to them. While heavy rain is something we Northwesterners take in stride, extreme temperatures are unusual. When a typical winter here doesn’t usually dip below 25 degrees Fahrenheit, a sustained few days and nights hovering around 16 degrees is notable. You can almost hear it, an audible shift. 

Your whole routine changes, along with your relationship with sunshine—bright bliss with no relief!—and the unforgiving grip of nightfall. The ponds and puddles freeze solid. The wind becomes a villain, stealing the heat from your nose and fingertips. 

Something that never ceases to amaze me when the extremes come—cold or heat alike—is the way all of the Creator’s children suddenly lose their boundaries with one another. We don’t begrudge the tiny birds sitting fluffed on the rafters in the woodshop, even if we know they will leave their dropping everywhere. We know there are mice in the garage, but we decide not to put out traps, for now. We pass the raccoons under the eaves of the shed and say nothing, decide not to shoo them away. We’re all just trying to get by, trying to deal with this strange cold snap.

Waiting for the thaw.   

I find that warmth truly comes from drawing near to one another in the midst of the cold, scattering seeds for the birds because they’re hungry and in need, sharing because you know that on the far side of sharing is paradoxical abundance. Miraculous providence. Something from nothing.  

While God’s grace whispers in our mundane, our routine, it shouts in our extremes. And we need the coldest days to give us memory of the warmth.

---

Author’s Note:

I explored the themes of this devotional in a recent piece of short fiction on Talebones, called Winter’s Nell.

If you’re interested, I hope you’ll read it and let me know what you think!

---

Moved by this piece (or simply feel like supporting my coffee habit) and want to contribute a one-time donation? Click the Tip Jar button below!

For more writings like this, subscribe for free!