It's Too Cold

The calendar says it's late March. The snow falling from the sky begs to differ.


It's the Winter That Will Not End. It has been cold, it still is cold, and it will stay cold for centuries to come.


This is the winter where I can't force myself to go back outside once I come home. Even when my house is on fire. Actually, especially when my house is on fire.


It's the winter where I eat everything in sight, in hopes that the process of digestion will incrementally raise my body temperature.


This is the winter where I've yet to go more than two consecutive hours without a fresh cup of coffee, even when I'm sleeping.


It's the winter where I can't change out of my office clothes when I get home because those five seconds in my underwear put me at risk of hypothermia.


It's the winter where the highlight of my day is burning my skin in the shower.


This is the winter that still going on, even in the spring.


There's no sun in this winter. There's a vague hint of gray light from the distance, but it isn't bright enough to be more than an unusually large flashlight.


Once every two weeks or so, winter will disappear for a day, only to roar back with a vengeance the next day as part of some cruel practical joke. Winter is laughing just thinking about the idea.


If Winter is really an old man, he's the kind of cranky old geezer who likes that he's driven us all just a little bit crazy. He's like the distant uncle who stays a few extra days after the rest of the family has cleared out after the holidays: he knows you don't really want him there but he's got nothing else to do, so it's December 29th and he's still crashing on your couch. Except in this case, it's March 25th, and he's still here. 


This winter has been a brutal slog where every day is more miserable than the last. I'm reasonably sure that Shakespeare proclaimed something else to be "the winter of our discontent," only because he'd never lived through anything like this.


Even my cats are cold. One sleeps on my leg each night and the other plops directly on my crotch. The resulting configuration is painful and paralyzing, but their warmth increases my body temperature half a degree, so I don't complain. At this point, I'm not even entirely sure I'd mind if they peed on me.


It's so cold that a snowman knocked on my door this morning, asking if he could come sit by the fire. I would have let him, but his snow wife was already here doing the same, and I didn't want him to get the wrong impression.


It's so cold that I don't unload my groceries when I come home from the store. I just leave them in the car in case I want some ice cream on my next drive.


It's so cold here that I saw a group of penguins at the bus station yesterday, shaking their heads in resignation while holding return tickets to the South Pole in their flippers.


It's a real life Narnia here, except for the part where winter gets to end after 100 years.  Allegedly, the Disney movie "Frozen" was released this week, but I swear I've been starring in it for three months straight.


Even with the heater running full blast, I can't keep my house a reasonable temperature. In fact, my hot tea froze over last while I tarried in squirting in a bit of lemon.  


In other words, it's just too cold.


Way too cold.

Pain and Healing

"The healing starts today," I said. "From this point on, every new step is a step toward getting better." I had meant well, when I said this to someone stuck in a hospital bed, but I had no idea how wrong I was.


The unfortunate thing about pain and suffering is that they aren't a linear phenomenon. The regular everyday hurt, like when your team loses an important ballgame or a friend says something hurtful seems to fade at a normal pace, but the physical or emotional pain that is significant enough to shake up our insides seems to play by its own rules.


Once it infects your system, one day can feel normal and the next, without warning, it finds you feeling broken and dead inside.


But feeling broken isn't always such a bad thing.  It gives us the freedom to stop chasing after the things that led us to our unhappy place to begin with. By doing so, our eyes are forced to open to the possibilities that we had previously found too hard or confusing.


The disappointment of a hope that didn't turn out according to our plans can burn for a long time. But, in some ways, going through life with fewer things written in stone can be liberating. As our need for control gives way to the cold hand of reality, we give up our attempts to steer that which is beyond our capabilities. In doing so, we save a lot of energy that we can refocus in more productive ways. Pain changes what matters to us, sometimes forcing us to focus on what's most important.

Broken people are God's favorite. When Jesus blessed the poor in spirit, perhaps he meant the people who didn't get wrapped so tightly in accomplishing their own plans that they closed their eyes to the needs that crossed their paths on the way to their destination. Perhaps he meant the people who had seen disappointment, those who were no longer blinded by their own ambitions, and those who as a result were more open to helping others reach theirs.


Being broken like that wouldn't be such a bad way to live if it could come without first being hurt.
If you are reading this, you're old to enough to have been wounded by someone you trusted. Maybe someone you cared about assumed the worst without hearing your side of the story. Maybe someone you thought was on your team treated you like an inconvenient burden. Maybe you don't feel respected by someone you can't avoid, or you can't trust that the people in your orbit are both safe enough to trust with your burdens and healthy enough to lighten your load.

Maybe life has disappointed you to the point that you feel not just broken, but crushed.


If this is you, you might be wondering how to put the pieces back together.
The unfortunate truth of life is that the things you work for don't always come through, the people near you don't always understand you or share your priorities, and an awful lot of time is spent trying to make sense of the resulting conflict.


There's no way around this. All you can do, is try to walk through it.

The best way forward is to find something meaningful to grab onto as you stumble along, and to find someone safe enough to steady your path as they muddle along beside you. And don't forget to stop and ask for directions often along the way.


Of course, this won't be easy. If your life abounded with meaning and an empathetic support system, you probably wouldn't be feeling so bad in the first place. So to find it, you might have to open yourself up a little more than normal so that those things you need have an opening to find you
.
As you start your journey forward, you'll be tempted to look behind you to see what hidden obstacles caused you to fall. This is helpful at first, Eventually, though, you must grab the insight and continue forward with all your strength, as to do otherwise will only slow you down.

Sometimes, it's not as easy as moving on. You can't put pain behind you when the circumstances causing it refuse to budge. In those cases, your only options are to change to the way you deal with the circumstance.

You can treat the difficult person in your life with more grace and love. You can advocate for your ideals instead of leaving your wishes up to fate and constantly feeling like a victim when things don't work out.You can make it a point to be a positive force to those around you.


You can get creative or give up your pride, and maybe you'll discover that you have more power to escape that difficult situation than what you've wanted to admit. You can accept the difficult as temporary, and be on the lookout for the good until it passes. You can even do all the above.
But whatever you do, if you don't like your current reality, don't just abide in its comfortable misery, choose to do your part towards replacing it with something new and beautiful, even if the only thing that changes is you.


As we wander toward our dreams, the hurt and suffering of brokenness are an inevitable interruption on our journey. Sometimes we feel powerless to fight them, so they throw us for a loop and prevent us from moving forward for a little while. That's normal, and it's ok.


But while pain might cause us to stagger backwards at times, it doesn't have to be the end of our trip.