Until We Feel The Warmth Again

Until We Feel The Warmth Again

My husband comes outside as I’m trying to put my fitful heart into words. He munches on a piece of dark chocolate, his work boots in hand.

“That’s funny.” He smiles. “It’s 41 degrees, and you’re sitting out here with a pile of ice at your feet. Cold is relative.”

Cold is relative.

After he puts on those boots and goes down to the barn, I open a new document and begin typing again.

This is the first week since our move that I can sense winter losing its power, so that I sit on the side porch with my back to the sun and the wind, listening to the snow thaw into streams and ice drip down the gutter.

It’s time to plant seedlings, but our tiny greenhouse is bare. It’s time to get chickens and goats, perhaps a regal Great Pyrenees to guard them, but it’s difficult to imagine this kind of pastoral ease when I use my spare time to look up the pros and cons of Gamma Knife radiosurgery.

However, I don’t want to lose these three months, holding off on life as we wait for the MRI’s outcome. Time is fleeting so that I turn on my side while my husband sleeps, studying his profile like a daguerreotype stamped against the moonlit dark.

The ice drips, the sun shifts. I recall his words, Cold is relative.

I would have never sat outside in Tennessee when it was 41 degrees and there was ice at my feet. But after a winter in Wisconsin, 41 degrees is almost sweet tea and sandals weather.

Pain, like cold, is relative to our experience.

Before my husband’s brain tumor, I felt pained if we didn’t get to go out on Friday night. I felt pained if I had to stand in line at the post office or if I got a three-star review on Amazon.

Now, I understand that this is not pain, just as I understand that 41 degrees is not cold.

Pain is what a family is going through as I type, who lost their mother to breast cancer.

Pain is what my friend is going through who is trying to build her life from the ground up after an unexpected event rocked her world’s foundation.

Pain is what a mother feels when she wakes in the mornings and understands afresh that her deceased son is never coming home.

I sit here in the relative warmth, wrestling pain into perspective, and remember my three-year-old daughter and me walking to the mailbox just last week.

We were both shivering and miserable but determined to keep taking steps.

At one point, we stopped and she huddled against me in her puffy snowsuit so my body could block the wind.

“Want to turn around?” I asked.

She shook her head and then reached for me. “Carry you,” she said.

So I picked her up and carried her to the mailbox and back to our house with the envelopes pressed between us.

She was still out in the elements; she could still feel the cold and the wind. But I was carrying her, so though the journey was the same, the experience was easier.

I believe God wants to carry us through our pain, if we’ll let him. We will, no doubt, still feel the harshness of the environment around us. We will, no doubt, still have to make the journey.

But the journey will be easier if we let him be our shield until the pain eases and we feel the warmth again.

Have you ever felt God carrying you through your pain?