As my family and I were awaiting a predicted winter storm
last week, expectations were running high among my children, and if I’m being
honest, myself as well. After coming home early from work, picking up my
children from school, and hunkering down at home, there was a sense of
reminiscence about the ice storm of 2003.
Call us crazy,
or maybe just people with a “be careful what you wish for” naiveté, but my
family and I find ourselves in those situations secretly hoping for a good dose
of rough weather. It’s not that I wish danger upon travelers or suffering for
the homeless, or even, for that matter, a few days off of work. Rather, I think
we just crave an adventure.
What makes bad
weather seem like an adventure? For one thing, it’s a reminder that no matter
how sanitized and scheduled our lives have become, there are still things
beyond our control. Our ancestors understood this more readily than us, tucked
safely as we are into our climate-controlled homes, eating produce grown in irrigated
fields and sold in well-stocked supermarkets.
There’s a
reason of course that people for generations have talked about the weather. For
an agricultural society, weather was everything—a family’s well being depended
upon the conditions necessary for a good crop. Families also oriented the
rhythm of their lives around the rhythm of the seasons, with activity slowing
in the colder and shorter days of winter, while later speeding up for planting
and harvest.
In our age,
we’ve largely lost the sense of rhythm that is built into the very fabric of
creation. Even the idea of Sabbath has become swallowed up in our relentless
urban pace, with little noticeable difference in retail hours or family
activity. Furthermore, electric illumination has made darkness irrelevant, so
that certain factories and businesses can run 24/7.
A good winter
storm, then, can bring us back to reality, force us to slow down, and expose
the presumptuousness of our well-laid plans. As the Scriptures remind us, “Come
now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town,
spend a year there doing business, and make a profit’—you have no idea what
your life will be like tomorrow. You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly
and then disappears. Instead you should say, ‘If the Lord wills it, we shall
live to do this or that’” (James 4:13-15).
Bad weather
can also remind of us of what we take for granted, such as electricity, heat,
easy travel, etc.—conveniences unknown to many in other places. A little
suffering is good for the soul, and reminds us of the plight of the world’s
poor.
Finally, bad
weather can remind us of the precious treasures we have in our family and
friends. For my children, they still cherish the memory from the winter of 2003
of being holed up in one room together for a couple of days, camped around our
fireplace, cooking a pork loan wrapped in aluminum foil in the hot embers. They
don’t remember the cold nights, the gray skies, or the scratchy throats from a
smoky house—they recall a family adventure.
They also
remember the friends who invited us to spend a few nights at their home—quite
an act of hospitality—and the time we spent with them, playing cards, breaking
out guitars and singing—just plain “visiting,” as they call it in the country.
Since the ice storm, I’m sorry to say, we haven’t taken time to get together
with them again, though we live only a few miles apart.
In the end, what does that say about us, about our lives,
and about what we value?
So thank God
for the occasional blessing of bad weather. Maybe it will remind us that God is
God, that we are not, and that our daily lives, our schedules, our health, our
families, and our comfort are all gifts from him. And with the wisdom of Job,
may we learn to say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away—blessed be the
name of the Lord!”
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