The Cold

I live in the Upper Midwest of the United States, and in winter it gets very cold here. It’s not the coldest place on earth, but, as we like to say, you notice it. On January 6, this year, the Feast of the Epiphany, the temperature dropped to -23 degrees. That’s Fahrenheit. It was cold.

As I must do every day, I ventured out in the early morning to run some errands and I certainly noticed it. In fact, the cold that day was so aggressive, so omnipresent, that, for the few moments I was out in it, I could think of nothing else.

The Psalmist tells us that all of God’s creatures praise him, Everything owes its existence to God. Everything by its existence glorifies God. I wondered how the cold was glorifying God on that Monday.

I was unable to ignore the cold. Everything I did was because of the cold. I could feel the cold penetrate my down filled coat and my fleece lined hat and mittens. The cold contorted my face, hurried my steps, and quickened my breathing. It wouldn’t let me be. It was all I could think of.

The cold was merely being itself, being true to its nature. But by being so raw and relentless it pushed its nature onto everyone and everything.

Because God is creator, all of God’s creatures show his glory. “Heaven and earth are full of your glory” we sing each Sunday. To see the glory of God in a tree or an elk or a mountain we make an intention to do so, We go there, take in the sight and reflect. In a blade of grass, in the face of a neighbor, in a mud puddle, God can be found. But I did not find God in the cold. In stead, God found me.

If only I could glorify God that way. If only I could be so true to my own nature that God’s creation of me would be undeniable. How true, how pure can I be? How much of my lifetime of accretions can be rubbed away so that I can be like the cold?

I believe that Christ, by his Incarnation, gave us the power to be as profound and insistent as the cold. His sanctifying presence on this earth released a spark into all of creation. How would the world look if we, as followers of Christ, were as bold as the north wind, as inclusive as a blanket of snow?

This is not a call to aggressive evangelism. It is a call to bring forth our true natures as Christ’s own to cover the earth with love, to be obviously God’s own. Can we be that?