I hate the cold.

Ok, that is probably too strong. So maybe I just hate how I feel when it’s cold.

But the older I get, the more I feel it. All the way into my bones. It is a slowness, a constricting, a paralyzing, unfriendly bitterness that makes me want to go into hibernation somewhere and not come out till about May.

And at the same time, I am 44 years old, and I know it is a part of the rhythm of life. The picture shown above is one of my very favorites from a few years ago. I stopped my truck alongside the road and took it looking off the Barren Ridge in Fishersville, one morning when there was ice all over everything and the sharp sting of the frost swallowed up your breath as soon as you stepped outside. But the breathtaking moment when the sun began to come up over the Blue Ridge, the little range of peaks that stand guard over the eastern side of our beloved Shenandoah Valley, and when the soft warmth that reflected in the clouds began to impinge on the glassy cusps of a hundred million little icedrops on the trees and grass, it was so beautiful I could not resist the cold.

What is it then? Is coldness a part of our lives we ought to embrace? Or is it a necessary evil we ought to lament and button up our hearts against?

That is actually rather a good question, and one I am perhaps not the best to answer. The only reason why I am writing about it is that my friend Chris Lassiter threw down the gauntlet the other day and I am a sucker for any kind of a challenge. But I will readily admit that my idea of dealing with the cold is to sit in my basement beside our cast-iron woodstove and read at my desk, arising only often enough to chuck some wood in so the temperature down here never gets below 80. And yes – that is an open invitation to any reading this, to come and join me. It will be quiet, because Beth is doing history homework and Emily is drawing at her art table, and the cat is sleeping on the arm of the sofa; but there are worse things in today’s frantic culture.

But when you have time to think, things start pressing in on you, and you have to deal with them. Cold is one of those things.

“Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” So Christina Rosetti, one of my favorite poets, in her hauntingly beautiful lyrics to “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which by the way if you have not heard Ash White sing, you’d ought to put your life on hold and do so.

But that image resonates with all of us, or at least all of us who live in non-equatorial climes. The sun reluctantly sets under the dark horizon, and the pale moonlight has sway over our senses, and the relentless chill of the hoarfrost enters into everything. No animals move about or birds sing, and the trees are spare and stark and motionless in the moan of the winter wind. Water does not yield to the splash of life, nor earth to the gardener’s spade. All things are still and silent.

A pastor I once knew used to call it “the dark night of the soul.” I think he got the phrase from one of the Puritans. It is that time of life when the spark of the Holy Spirit does not catch and grow in the fresh tinder of our hearts. It is when the memory of our sins rises up forbidding before us, and we forget to rebuke the devil in the matchless Name that bought us, and slowly and sadly we sink down in the answerless void that is Regret. The many opportunities we had to lay hold of spiritual power and missed, the many moments when the allure of sin caught hold of some chink in our armor and we fell to our knees gasping in our alien longing for it, the friends we once used to take sweet counsel with who are now long estranged, the long dark nights after another failure when despair has settled in to our hearts like the frozen, piercing talons of a hovering bird of prey: All these are what it is like for the Christian to feel the cold, and there is not a one of us who has been immune.

But what do we do with this? To feel the wreckage of the world closing in is only to follow in our Master’s footsteps, for so He told us we would. Afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying in our body the death of Jesus. Is that where our birthright ends, though? Surely not.

And here is where, if you are at all like me, you often take the wrong fork in the road. Isaiah in chapter 44 of his magnificent prophetic work paints a portrait of a man who chooses a tree and cuts it down. Half of it he burns in the fire, and over its warmth you can all but feel his childlike pleasure. “Ah, I am warm. I see the fire!” The reflection of the amber flames flickers over his face as he sits before it.

But when his chill is finally conquered and his heart lifted to action, he does not lift his eyes to God who gave the blessing, but rather picks up the other chunk of wood and decides to make an idol of it. “Deliver me, for you are my god!” he says delightedly. For if this created thing was able to make him feel the bliss of warmth, must it not be his highest good?

No.

All the things I look to that make me feel alive: Spending time with people I love, working hard to earn money, reading and writing words that sparkle and burn as you lift them up to look on them, going on a 10-mile run on a warm day, watching a sunset lift beauty to heights I had not imagined; all these are only created things, and all they can ever do is reflect something of the heart of the One who gave them.

They cannot, ever, be my highest good. Even though they are good things.

And when I do not give thanks to my God for the warmth that moves me from the dark night of the soul, but rather seek comfort in my many forms of subtle false worship, His Spirit says to me, with the sobering words of another prophet, Haggai: “Consider your ways, Jeremy. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourself, but you are never warm.”

And a chill sets in; but it is not the chill of the winter. It is the sudden realization that He speaks those hard things, not to hurt or to punish me, but because it is the truth. A truth that will set me free.

And I begin to realize something.

It is not truly the cold that I hate – that the New Creation in me hates. It is distance.

My dad, ever the astute astronomer (as well as theologian) informed me the other day that we are currently 91,485,528 miles from the sun, and getting further. It makes me cold just to think about it. I cannot wait for the warm spring to break in and bring things to life again.

And so it is with God.

Sin causes distance. It hurts, deceives, twists, maligns, steals, destroys. I have seen it happen for 44 years.

Let’s make it intensely personal – MY sin does all that. I have sinned against Heaven and against my Father, and no longer deserve to be called His son. Can He just take me back as a servant? That would be great. Do not call me Naomi, but call me Mara! for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. Leave me to bow my head to it, like a stalk of wheat withering under the cruel onslaught of the swiftly coming frost. Just leave me.

But He brushes all that aside, true as it may be, with an intense and overwhelming divine impatience. He drops all that He was doing, and runs toward me faster than I am moving toward Him, as I am coming back from a far country that was further than any 91 million miles. He throws His arms around my neck, and He dresses me all in white, and puts a ring on my finger, and shoes on my feet, and throws the biggest party his servants have ever seen; because His son has come home. And the stalk of wheat that had died begins to grow, to sprout something green and alive again.

God isn’t into distance either? No, and more so than I can ever know, for He created me for communion with Him, and long did I seek Him in far and forbidden places, yet my heart has never found a home anywhere else.

Because all that truth about sin could not just be ignored. Someone had to take the bitterness of the Law’s punishment for it. The etymology of the word bitter is from an old Germanic word, meaning to bite or to devour. Someone had to be consumed, to give of their life a living sacrifice, so that I could walk free from it. So that from now on coldness could be a sober reminder, a call to meditate and remember; but no longer a death sentence. I have fallen short of the glory of God, but He has not abandoned my soul to Hell, and He has removed my transgressions as far from me as the East is from the West. Jesus Christ has bought me with His precious blood, and I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior.

For God does hate distance. Behold, the dwelling-place of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people. And He paints for us in John’s Revelation one of the most heart-achingly beautiful pictures of what a life finally lived close by with His glory will really be like, in eternity, when His Spirit says that there will no longer be any need for a sun to shine on that City any more, but its lamp will be the Lamb.

Does that vision warm you? I can feel it.

Until then, let us keep on exhorting one another every day, as long as it is called Today, that none of us may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin; and let us not forget that our Lord was born into this world upon a cold and a silent night. Come over and sit by my fire this evening, and meditate with me on it, and in worship tomorrow we will speak His glories with tongues of fire to a lonely and shivering world.

JV

Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV