Coming In from the Cold
By Audrey Stallsmith
My life during what seemed an endless severe cold snap consisted of a lot of breaking ice out of water dishes for my poultry and worrying that those birds might freeze to death. I also had to run a gas fireplace, space heater, and even my stove sometimes in addition to the furnace to keep the house warm enough—and a vaporizer to keep the air moist enough.
I learned that using the space heater and vaporizer at the same time as my microwave oven throws a breaker. And just about the time the cold snap finally ended, I discovered that there was a gas leak behind the aforementioned gas fireplace.
But I’m trying to look on the bright side. After all, my having to turn the gas off to that fireplace happened after I no longer needed it anymore. And my water pipes didn’t freeze as they did for my church and several of my acquaintances.
Also, although many of the seedlings I started early damped off due to the house being on the chilly side, we have had plenty of snow cover throughout the recent frigid snap. That helped protect my outdoor plants from the nasty temperatures.
All of that running back and forth to feed the chickens and wild birds in my barn boots did get me some interesting red blisters on one foot, but those appeared to be old-fashioned chilblains rather than frostbite. And, although a couple of my roosters suffered a little frostbite on the tips of their big combs, those spots seemed to be the only birdy booboos caused by the cold.
Of course, warmer weather brought additional problems, with me having to wear crampons on my boots to navigate the ice. And I had to call my poor brother very late one evening with the demand that he return the sump pump he’d borrowed before my basement flooded.
But I remind myself that my troubles are very small when compared to some recently faced by friends and more public figures. So, I tend to croon an old soul song in my mind, the place where I can actually carry a tune, both for them and myself. “O-o-h, child. Things are gonna get easier. O-o-h, child. Things’ll get brighter.”
To me, the person speaking in the lyrics of “O-o-h Child” is God, though I don’t know whether or not that was the songwriter’s intent. The tune, by The Five Stairsteps, came out in 1970—a year afflicted by social unrest, the Kent State shootings, the Vietnam War, etc.—so it definitely hit a chord with everybody!
I recently read Henri J. M. Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son and that helped warm my heart too. The late priest wrote the book after viewing Rembrandt’s painting of the same name in Russia, though he had to warm himself in a more literal way by perching on a radiator for a while after a guard got annoyed about him sitting in front of the painting for too long.
Nouwen points out that we already have all we need in our Father’s love. But, as he points out, even those of us who have stayed in the Church all our lives also can be called prodigal. That is because we often still “go out” in a sense when we think we need to receive the justification for our existence from the world.
So, if we aren’t perceived as winners by that world, we think we’ve failed. As one who occasionally suspects that my life has been less than a triumph, I can identify when Nouwen—who was a much more successful writer than I am, notes that “My life is an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me.” He goes on to remind us that “The world’s love is and always will be conditional.” A Father’s love is not.
When you think about it the resentment was all on the wrong side in that story. The younger son apparently bristled under his father’s rules enough to want to get far away from him. And the older son hated the fact that the delinquent younger one got all of the attention.
But it was the father who had the most cause for resentment. He should have been angry about the fact that his younger son, by demanding his inheritance, was basically wishing that father dead—and only returned when he ran out of all other options.
Also, if the older son had really loved his father, he should have been happy about what made his father happy. Instead, that son lost both trust and gratitude when he began thinking he wasn’t getting what he deserved.
The only one who appears to be free of resentment in this story is the father himself. Rather than feeling bitterness over his children’s attitudes, he watches anxiously for their return. Even if that return just means, as in the older son’s case, a return to his original love for his father, based on who that father is rather than what he does or doesn’t give.
Speaking of which, I think our heavenly Father often gives us much more than we are aware of at the time. My fireplace’s gas leak may have been there for quite some time, after all. And, since I usually start that fireplace with a lighter because the igniter doesn’t work very well, somebody obviously was looking out for me.
Though we often use the term “looking out” to mean “taking care of,” we’d do well to remember its other meaning. We need to picture a Father looking out of his window at the road down which he hopes his children will finally come in from the cold.