“He hurls down his
hail like pebbles.
Who can withstand his icy blast?
He sends his word and melts them;
he stirs up
his breezes, and the waters flow.” Psalm 147:17
I wouldn’t
call it balmy exactly, but we’ve seen worse. The weather app says 12-whole degrees right now, folks, feels like -3. It’s January, but, trust me, 12
degrees is cup of tea. On New Years Day we drove three hours north to Minnesota when
the temps weren’t even close to zero. See that verse up there? I’m telling you,
it’ll be months before “he stirs up the breezes, and the waters flow.”
Here’s
what my friend Spurgeon says: “It is ours to submit to
deprivations with patience, seeing the cold is his cold.” Oooh, ain’t that
the truth? And then,“That which God
sends, whether it be heat or cold, no man can defy with impugnity, but he is happy
who bows before it with child-like submission.”
In church
that Sunday, a young couple stood up front, their toddler in arms, while the
preacher let the water flow over: Baptism, a sacrament, a touch of the eternal
ordained by Christ. Mom and dad were my students not that long ago. I liked
them then, still do. The child shook a bit when splashed upon. People giggled. He’s
their first.
Right in
front of us sat a family whose oldest child, autistic, was a presence at the
sacrament, making high-pitched squeals, squirming. When he got too loud, his
mother gave him her hand, touched him. Later his little sister, half his age,
did the same thing, offered him her hand.
Back
then, our son had just lost most of what he owns in a fire. We were worried,
not because of financial loss, but because his state of mind and soul could
have tanked. But the fire may well have been phoenix-ish because new
relationships offered themselves from the ashes.
I had
been reading The Road, Cormac
McCarthy’s haunting apocalypse novel, about a father and son trying to believe
in goodness in the middle of a wasted world. That book was haunting me, even in
the middle of baptism, maybe because of it.
And then there
was the preacher himself, who was, with his wife, worried about their own son,
a kid with more than his share of problems.
Church
was a house of mirrors that morning—up front, the promises of parents holding a
dear first child, while a preacher with his own promises tried to guarantee
something with three thin handfuls of water. Five rows back sat parents who’ve
been making a go of their son’s autism for a dozen years. Six rows back, my
wife and I, worried about what got ruined in a fire—and me haunted by a novel.
If
there’s a more compact set of contrary images to display the rule of God
anywhere in scripture than what we find here in two verses of Psalm 147, I
don’t know that I’d like to find it. Charles Spurgeon is right: “That which God
sends, whether it be heat or cold, no man can defy with impugnity,” he says,
“but he is happy who bows before it with child-like submission.” Of course,
he’s right.
The icy
blasts we’re now amidst, mid-January, are from his hand, as is what will
certainly be one first great emerald morning come April.
But it’s
hard work to be child-like, when there’s so much down the road.
But then, there’s also the promise
of baptism, another Father—and we his children, our faces washed with love. Today,
our son has become one of that squad of firemen who once, long ago, tried to
put out fire that consumed his apartment complex and so much of what he owns. I’m
not making this up.
And, listen to this, soon enough—this
week!—a brand new baby will be born to the wife of that fireman.
There’s more to life than winter.
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