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| Sometimes, we just feel stuck... |
Every year as I shiver under a pile of blankets, my husband asks something like, “Wouldn’t you like to be on a beach right now?” “No,” I answer. While he was only teasing, he still accuses me of being masochistic. I point out the logistics of such a venture with four our kids, and we add more blankets to the pile. But this year I realized something: even if it were easy to manage, I still wouldn’t choose a yearly retreat each winter.
Why? Why choose to stay in winter? I suppose part of it has
to do with how you view winter. Consider what God promised to Noah back when He
painted the first rainbow across the sky:
“[T]he Lord said in
his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the
intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again
strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:21b-22,
emphasis added)
Winter is part of a promise. It’s a season God created
(Psalm 74:17), sustains, and sends as evidence of His faithfulness. Even so,
how often do we dare to perceive it as such? Rainbows are beautiful reminders
of God’s mercy. But snow?
Most of my life, winter didn’t come with a break. When it
got colder, we put on more layers. When our 1920s radiators weren’t enough
to fight the drafts, we put our dogs under the blankets with us. My parents may
have desired a warm vacation, but Florida wasn’t in the budget. Instead, we
went to the tropics exhibit at the zoo. Mostly, we came to understand that
winter was a part of life. We all had fits of grumbling, but there it was. We
couldn’t hibernate during it. We couldn’t fly away from it. Only one option
remained: go through it.
We did. More than that, with my parents’ help, I learned to
look for the unique blessings and rhythm of the season. For a kid in the inner
city, winter had benefits. For a few months, a beautiful blanket of snow hid the
crumbling asphalt. Abandoned parking lots became glittering fields for dog sled
runs. There was quiet. No drug dealers or prostitutes roamed the sidewalks.
There was peace. The earlier sunsets, cold temperatures, and snow were perfect
excuses not to stay out late in the evening, but to enjoy more time at home and
turn in early with a good book. Winter was like a freshly-washed sheet God used
to tuck in a child over-wrought from all his warm-weather work and play. It was
rest. Winter meant curling up in my armchair and sipping cocoa while listening
to Tchaikovsky or piecing together jigsaw puzzles at the dining room table. It
was a season of simple contentment.
That was my childhood. Now I share winter with four young
children and the season sometimes involves more war than peace when a polar
vortex keeps us inside day after day after day. Even now Lego structures,
magnet tile mansions, and blanket forts fill the house. Somehow the kids avoid
bouncing them down even while trampling the unsuspecting parent who dares to
cross the racetrack to fetch food out of the fridge. There are beautiful days
when the temperature rises above 15* and everyone bundles up in a complicated
layering of snow pants, jackets, boots, hats, and mittens. Once my polar
explorers finally totter out the door, I might get a peaceful 20 minutes. If
the snow is right for sculpting, I may get over an hour. But there are days when
they stomp back inside after 15 minutes declaring it is too cold outside and
start dumping gear all over the floor. That’s when it begins to feel there is
no escape.
The question I must ask myself at this point is, “does there
need to be an escape?” What about winter makes me deserve an escape? Maybe it
is uncomfortable, but has God failed to supply us with what we need? Perhaps
what needs to change isn’t my location or circumstance, but my attitude.
That’s the heart of the issue: attitude. I don’t have a
problem with sunshine and warmth, and I strongly support going on family
vacations. There are lots of good reasons to travel south during the winter and
those who get the chance to should thank God for His good gift. Maybe someday
we will travel south too, but not every year. Here’s why: when we build a
yearly ritual into our calendar, we are constructing a habit.
Habits aren’t always bad, but they can feed attitudes.
Consider if I get into a pattern of telling myself that when I feel stuck in a
place that’s uncomfortable and inconvenient, it’s okay to get away from it. The
circumstance doesn’t have to be winter. It could just be the ordinary grind of
stay-at-home-mom life. I love my kids—but I also crave time away from them and
their craziness. Anytime their grandparents offer to take them, the kids are
available and I make my plans. While the break itself is innocent, that attitude
of entitled escape can become an expectation in my own soul. Soon enough, I
fixate on getting an escape and stop looking for God’s grace at work in and around
me. Instead of trusting the Good Shepherd for His wise provision, I start looking
for circumstances I think would be better pastures. But the fact of the matter
is that His sovereign love has placed me here, at home with kids in winter.
Consider Psalm 139:16b: “in your book
were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet
there was none of them.” Every one of them—even cold and crazy days. What
if instead of looking for a way to escape, I said to my soul, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let
us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24), and then looked for reasons
to be glad in it?
The saying is “bloom where you’re planted.” In
Minnesota, that includes blooming in winter. This season isn’t our enemy; it’s
a season from God. God is still on the throne of heaven commanding an
unchanging sequence of seasons because of His mercy toward His creation. He will
not leave us in winter forever, just long enough to do us good. To everything
there is a season, and the unwavering hope in every season is that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today
and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). As snowflakes fall, may we train our hearts to
see the glory He is revealing to us instead of merely looking for something “greener.”
May we find our contentment in His provision, our peace in His perfect plans
for us, and our hope in knowing He who sends snow will also send spring.
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