Hot and Cold
Dense clouds have dropped down, hugging the earth with a thick haze. In yesterday’s sunshine, autumn’s tall dry grasses waved above the snow warming the whiteness of winter with hints of tawny gold. Today, all color is muted. The edges of familiar tree-bark-browns fade away; treetops dissolve into fog. It looks as if a paintbrush has covered earth’s canvas from top to bottom with a thick wash of soft wet shadow. The furthest woods are hid from view and the nearby woods are indistinct and blurred.
The powdery flakes are gone too, sunk, pressed, sculpted and compacted into ice crusted ridges and clefts under air that quivers with moisture. It’s still freezing cold outside, but the temperature is rising. In an hour or two, the weatherman predicts 34o F with sun to burn away all fog. The country roads will be safer, or at least visible, to the venturesome. Hopefully the plows will spread salt and dig deeply into gravel to keep our wheels from slipping and spinning on ice slick hills. I shall stay in today—perhaps to think about mysteries of hot and cold. I’ve never before considered the wonders of changing temperatures as I’m sensing them this morning.
When it comes to temperature, I’m limited to common knowledge, like 98.6 being a fever and warmth on cold ground bringing fog. I know hot dishes shatter if cooled too quickly and I’ve felt the upsetting conflicts when heated desires encounter cold rejection or disinterest. I know that under the sun’s warmth the hero in my childhood storybook took off his coat, but that in cold winds and falling temperatures, he drew it tight.
I also recall that Jesus preferred people who were either hot or cold; He said He’d spit the lukewarm ones out of His mouth. I wonder if that means that He loves the atheists who refuse him or the rebellious ones who fight Him more than many of us who say we follow Him with halfhearted effort.
Although I appreciate that Earth’s balance of heat and cold is finely tuned for human survival and I’m grateful for the gifts of comfortable weather, I don’t fully understand phenomena like the contrast between a star’s heat and the subzero temperatures of outer space or the complexities of discerning whether global warming is a hoax, a blessing that will delay the long overdue next ice age, or a threat to human life.
Musing on hot and cold reminds me that I also have a miracle story about hot and cold. It’s a personal one. Once, many years ago, in the 1960’s when cold feet keep me awake at night, I’d warm my chilled toes against’ my sleeping husband’s legs. It was a comfort I took for granted. The winter that we separated, my feet got very, very cold.
My feet got cold because my children and I lived in a little house under some mighty oak trees atop of the high ridge of an ancient moraine. Our car, a tan Mercury Comet, was parked in a bare place beyond the sheltering trees. When the cold northwest wind blew through the night, no antifreeze could keep its oil from thickening, no electric cord was long enough to reach the car, and if it did, no light bulb hot enough to keep that motor from freezing up— and that car had to start up for me almost as soon as dawn’s early light replaced the dark of night.
The car had to start because I had to drive my sons, six and eight years old, to their school bus stop. It was about three quarters of a mile from our house, down a winding, unsheltered, wind swept farm road. It was a long trudge for little boys with school bags and lunch boxes. Fresh drifts were often above their boots tops, hard for such small feet and legs to wade into and cut through in freezing temperatures. So I’d drive them down to the main road and we’d wait in the car together until they’d spy the big yellow school bus coming closer, give me a wave and hop out to meet their friends.
Keeping the Comet alive required babying it with extra warmth through freezing cold nights. Running the motor at ten minutes at ten p.m. was not enough. Some nights I’d be pulling on my boots, coat and mittens and heading into the snow and wind to warm the engine at ten, one and then again at four a.m.
My feet got cold. They stayed cold. In August, while visiting an Arizona ghost town, I stood under the steady sun beside a rock too hot to touch, looking out on the desert in temperatures above 110 degrees in the shade and said, “Finally. My feet are starting to warm up a little—just a little.” But the cold soon returned to my toes.
That fall, as the first winter chill set in, a night came when my feet were once again too cold to sleep. I did not have a heating pad or a hot water bottle so I quietly asked the Holy Spirit to warm my feet. He did—His slow warmth immediately displaced the cold and kept my feet warm for the next thirty years. Now that my husband and I are remarried to each other, I sometimes get cold feet again.
Millions of believers have witnessed the Holy Spirit’s heat. The two disciples who walked with Jesus on the Road to Emmaus said, “Did not our hearts burn within us when He talked with us by the way?” Luke 24:32 Saint John of the Cross wrote, O living flame of love/That tenderly wounds my soul. Often when compassionate Christians ask Jesus to heal the sick and wounded, the person being prayed for will feel God’s heat. Many men and women with God’s healing charismata, His gift of healing, report that when the Holy Spirit is moving through them to heal their hands will become very hot.
There’s a mystery about warmth and cold— the way the natural and metaphorical point to spiritual realities. It defies all scientific description.
As I’ve been writing, the fog has dissolved. Bright sun casts short noonday shadows upon the almost blue brilliance of frozen snow as it reflects miniscule sparks and dazzles of light back toward clear blue skies. Under winter sweats, my hearts is warm, though enough chill comes in around the windows to keep the tips of my nose and fingers cool.
God’s presence moves through the temperate air of the earth, touching our bodies, turning our minds to thoughts of forever, as He looks for opportunities to fill our moments with the warmth of loving and being loved. Soon I shall get up from my chair and pull a casserole of warmly spiced shepherd’s pie from the cold refrigerator and gratefully heat it in a hot oven for lunch. My gratitude for a piping hot lunch is greater, richer for today’s unexpected glimpse into the mysteries of God. I wonder, “What, Father? What are you revealing about Your self, Your nature, and Your order in such a common ordinary everyday taken for granted phenomenon as temperature change?” Suddenly, my thoughts dim as I sense a Divine Presence draw nearer and all curiosity fades into loving worship of the One who so loved this world, with all its heat and cold, that He gave His only begotten Son to save it. (John 3:16-17)
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 1 Corinthians 13:12
