Two Kinds of Winter

"Winter is Coming." So says Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones to anyone who will listen. His warnings were not the ramblings of a man who hated cold bones and deep snow, but the warnings of a king who knew the Deep Winter brought monsters to ravage the land, robbing the people of their souls.  Summer will arrive in Winterfell eventually, but not for everyone.  This winter will be long and cruel, and unfortunately the monsters outside the door may not be that much worse than the ones inside the castle.
     Winter is coming.  It is a phrase that resonates with me since I moved to Traverse City.  In Alabama, the land of my youth, we welcomed the cool respite of winter.  Not so much in the frozen north.

I went hiking with my boys and my dog along the Boardman River today in Traverse City. We were all ready to get out and do something at the end of a long, Northern Michigan winter. Trixie splashed through the stream while Braden climbed trees and Vincent ran as far in front of us as he could, red jacket bobbing through the trees.

Summer is coming.Winter is leaving, but not without a struggle.  Last weekend, 30 inches of snow fell in about 24 hours.  If there was ever a time I have seen creation groan in Michigan, it was then.  The snow was mercilessly heavy, snapping trees and power lines, stranding thousands without heat or power, and forcing the closure of schools and churches.  The last month of Winter roared its way into our lives with one final gasp, unwilling to let us go, but unable to stop the changing of the times.

Summer is coming. The sun is out this week. Irises poke through my flowerbeds; little rivulets run along the side of road; the flitting birds around the feeder sound a bit more buoyant and hopeful.  Last weekend, I saw a huge flock of geese searching a snowy cornfield for a little extra food; today the swans were gliding across a sun-drenched Boardman Lake.  Last weekend, my oldest son made a snowball six feet high; today he practiced track outside in shorts and a T-shirt.

I have learned how to grudgingly appreciate some things about the winter months.  You can do some pretty cool things with snow.  But I have also experienced some seasons in life that have reminded me of a deeper reality.

There is more than one kind of winter. 

Ten years ago, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; two years ago, my youngest son was tested for autism; several times in our 22 years of marriage, my wife was forced to wrestle her way through the aftermath of miscarriages.  Twice in my life, I have felt the doom of a nervous breakdown approaching slowly, heavily, inexorably.
     With the arrival of these winters came monsters grim and terrible.  Somewhere, a beautiful summer offered warmth and life.  Some days, I did not believe it. But it was true, nonetheless.

But there is also more than one kind of summer.

 In a realm beyond this mortal coil, there is warmth; there is hope; there is life.  Winter is only a season.  In several cases, summer came quickly. My youngest son still has some challenges, but he does not have autism; my wife has grieved, but she has also battled through the valleys and shadows of lost children and dreams.  My nervous breakdowns were not the end of my life; by God's grace I recovered and moved on, older and hopefully wiser.
    On the other hand, my dad lost his life in that harshest of seasons. His winter ended quickly, but mine had just begun.  That season has taken longer to change, but warmth has trickled back in slowly, and a ten-year-old blizzard is now trickling in small streams along the road of life. The One who gave new life to my father has been faithful to bring warmth to a lonely, cold son.

And so I hiked today with my boys, grateful that summer is coming, and that winter is only one season after all.

     In Revelation, John makes the curious comment that the new Heaven and Earth will have "no more sea."  That makes sense - not because water is evil, but because a non-seafaring Jewish nation saw the waters of the deep as the home of the worst terrors in the world.  
     Perhaps if John had lived here, he would have promised "no more winter," not because snow is bad, but because we know what it means to be cold, and we long for the son.

     I have no doubt that I will be cold again. On this side of heaven, summer is just a season too.  But one day the Son will warm the world for good, and the true winters of life will be forgotten as I hike farther up and farther in to a land that never grows cold.

Wintery Theology

    We got about 2 feet of snow here in Traverse City last night.  The view from my window this morning was beautiful.

But the beauty of winter is a mixed blessing. While the snow hangs delightfully on the trees, and my boys made a 6-foot-tall snowball, and snowmobilers are out in force, there is downside. Thousands are without power, a lot of people ended up in the ditch, and the city declared a State of Emergency.
 

In my own yard I see this tension between beauty and pain. The branches on the apple tree hang to the ground like a wintery willow, but some of those branches will break, and I will not get apples next fall.  My dog loved playing in the snow - but my dogwoods were smashed to the ground by the weight of the storm.

     Winter is one of those seasons that highlights the tension between the pain embedded in a fallen creation and the beauty that still lingers from God's original design.  Winter has moments that remind us what this world could have been like if it had not fallen: a world where the beauty of snow does not carry with it the danger of death and destruction; a world in which happiness and awe do not have to be tempered by the sobering reality of death and destruction. While we enjoy the displays of God's creativity and power, in the background we hear the groaning of a creation waiting for redemption. (Or was that my boys when I told them it was time to shovel?)

  In Game of Thrones, Eddard Stark keeps warning people: "Winter is coming."  For us, winter is already here.  There is a season in which living things die, killed by that which is simultaneously beautiful, stark, glorious and dark. We live in a world inhabited by a lot of things that go bump in the night, that crouch just around the corner waiting to do us in.  If we are not careful, our very souls become wintery, frozen and blustery, refusing to see the beauty around us as we slide into the ditches that rob us of life.

    But Spring is on the way. New life is just around the corner.  The winter of our discontent does not have to turn into a life of disillusionment.  Even on the coldest, most blustery days, God embeds his beautiful, broken world with reminders that He is not limited by the ravaging effect that our freely chosen sin has had on our existence.  Even as I type this, I know that underneath the snow in my front yard hyacinths have already broken through, ready for the warmth and life of spring.
 
   The world may be temporarily broken - it is still wintery - but it is still His.  And He is pretty good at putting things right.

                                       

BOOK REVIEW

As a self-published author, PR is crucial.  I have been overwhelmed at times by how many people graciously go out of their way to read, interview, and write as I bug them as part of my "Shameless Self-Promotion Tour." It's humbling, believe me.  I was just informed of another review today, and I am grateful once again.  An excerpt from CSI (Christian Schools International) 

In a grief memoir, I expected to find romantic poets, crusty theologians, and maybe a mega-church youth pastor or two. Instead, each chapter began with quotes from some of my favorite writers: Elie Weisel, J.R.R. Tolkein, Stephen R. Donaldson, Neil Gaiman, C.S. Lewis, Dostoyevsky, Stephen King, and Voltaire. And the quotes were thought provoking and, above all, authentic, adjectives that also describe the memoir that comes wrapped in these quotes.  

Oh, if you are interested in the book, click on the picture in the right hand column of this blog to go to the website, or just go to amazon.com.

The Pain of God and the Pain of the World

     I have often felt like Christians are afraid to look real life in the face.  Hard times fall upon us, and we look away, not wanting to acknowledge that God might let us wade through the waters instead of pulling us from every flood that comes our way.  Avoidance is an understandable but futile desire.  Pain will find us.   Hope will at time seem fleeting.  Before there can be resurrection, there must be a day of crucifixion and a day of despair.
    I appreciate N.T. Wright's wisdom in Socrates in the City

"The closer you get to Jesus, the closer you get to the Cross; and you may well find that the pain of the world, as well as the joys of the world, will stretch you and pull you until you feel as though you were being pulled apart.  Saint Paul says that's precisely  the point: that's what we should expect to happen when the Holy Spirit is at work in someone's heart so that they are being 'conformed to the image of God's Son.'  That is the meaning of fully Christian prayer.  Part of the Christian calling is to be a person and a community where the pain of the world and the pain of God can come together."

These pains cannot meet unless they are both embraced.  May we, the people of a suffering and resurrected God, be ready to share in the fellowship of his suffering, and not just the power of his resurrection.

Death Glorious and Triumphant

     We can't escape the fact that we live in a world full of both beauty and pain.  For whatever reasons, the God who made it seems content to let us experience the spectrum.  I have spent years wondering why; I'm sure I will spend many more seeking to understand this mysterious plan.  On the one hand, pain and loss have undone me; on the other hand, I have experienced transcendent moments of beauty and peace, signposts of a world to come.
    In the midst of both devastation and joy, we are called to be content with whatever situation we have been given while simultaneously striving for the restoration offered by  God's Kingdom in the midst of a broken world.
     Peter Kreeft captures the tension well:

"On the one hand, suffering is blessed. Count it as joy when you go through manifold tribulations.  On the other hand, we are supposed to relieve it - like poverty.  Blessed are the poor - and yet the relief of poverty is one of the commandments of Christianity.  Death, which is the fishnet that catches all the fish of poverty and every other suffering in itself, is the worst thing.  It is the last enemy.  Jesus comes to conquer it through resurrection.

On the other hand, death is glorious.  There is an old oratorio that has this hauntingly beautiful line: "Thou has made death glorious and triumphant, for through its portals we enter into the presence of the living God."  Somehow or other, in this strange drama, the worst things are used as the best things.  Even morally, the worst sin ever committed, the most horrible atrocity ever perpetrated in the history of the world, was the murder of God's Son, and Christians celebrate this as Good Friday and the cause of the their salvation.  It is very strange - like life."

- from Socrates in the City