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A message from Pastor Peter Marty

Strangely warmed

By Pastor Peter Marty

It gets really old to talk about the weather. People become uninteresting. Insights become less than insightful. The local TV news networks are the worst. Count the broadcast minutes devoted to local weather conditions sometime. It is inundation, pure and simple. Every day, people are dying and rising — for goodness sakes! — withering and transcending nearly impossible circumstances. They are living life with courage, class, and sometimes defeat. News of their stories rarely makes it onto anyone’s radar for the evening news.

Maternity units around the globe are filling up with newborns named Barack, Malia, and Sasha. It won’t be long in our weather-obsessed culture before “Doppler” will surface as the most popular name.

Admittedly, it has been bitter cold this month. Dangerously so. This does qualify as news. When the temperatures stay sub-zero for so many consecutive days, “freezing to death” suddenly becomes more than an expression. A 93-year-old Bay City, Michigan, man dies of the cold inside his own home. Animals on the farm huddle in constant jeopardy. Ukraine and Russia wield gas pipeline valves as if people were cheap dice. Really frigid weather can add up to more seriousness than just inconvenient ice jams in your new gutter.

When the arctic air swept through the Midwest earlier this month, I headed north. The record-breaking cold in the Quad Cities was magnified in Collegeville, Minnesota. For 11 of my 12 days on a writing project there, it was below zero. Minus 11 degrees. Minus 18. Minus 32 the morning I left. I walked a quarter mile to the gym every morning, doing what we all do when bottled up behind a ski mask and under a hood — I babbled to myself. I kept encouraging my feet to stay focused. “Keep your head down and against the wind. Keep blinking your eyes when they tear up from the brittle cold.” My glasses took five minutes to de-ice once inside, frosted like those pre-chilled beer mugs that you scrape with your fingernail.

It was too cold for any ice fisherman on the lake across the road. There was one fishing hut out there and the same pick-up truck on the gravel shoulder every day. I actually wondered if the guy had expired out there and no one had discovered his body yet.

What astounded me were the construction workers building a dormitory. I guess they have no choice between working year-round and trying to survive on a work schedule that waits for the six good weather months. I didn’t even know a circular saw functioned at 24 degrees below zero. These guys were four stories up, in swirling winds, confidently walking the peak of a roof with a leaf blower in hand, blowing off the latest six inches of snow. Another worker yards away was busy cutting shingles with his razorblade knife. I kept thinking, “Who needs a razorblade knife in this weather. Just snap the darn things.”

In the morning, I fixed a pot of coffee. Every night around 8:30 I brewed a cup of tea. It was heavenly warmth as I dipped my biscotti into the tea. I momentarily forgot about the stinging pain of the cold, and the squirrels and birds outside who must have been having a hard time of it all. It is an odd thing to be warm when everything and everyone else can be so cold.

Do you know the conversion experience of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism? He was repeatedly frustrated trying to please God and be good. One night in May of 1738, at around 8:45 p.m., he felt his heart “strangely warmed.” Wesley wasn’t sipping tea. He was listening to someone read Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans when he felt a sudden trust in Christ take over. His life would never be the same.

At St. Paul, we talk about a lot of about the warmth of Christian fellowship. We profess this strange and odd feeling that against all the forces of a cold and sometime careless world, there is a heart-warming love that transcends all bloodlines. It is strange thing that the Lord Christ would enter our human relationships and make something special out of them. I don’t entirely get it, and may never. I do know, though, that it beats even a warm cup of tea on a cold winter’s night.

Pastor Peter Marty,

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