It was my sister's first Boot Day too, her first outing in snow to go shopping since she had her full knee replacement in October. It was nice to be frozen together as I started the car and used front and back window defrosters to melt the snowflakes. We counted on our mutual animal warmth sitting side by side in the front seat to warm us up until the car's heater did.
Mutual animal warmth is a great thing. I remember power failures in the past from winter storms when our electricity went off and the furnace was off and my husband and kids and I felt like icicles and wore multiple layers of clothes, even jackets, inside the house and snuggled together under blankets to keep warm.
But emotional warmth is a furnace that thaws people out in all seasons. Especially in families. Sometimes boiling outdoor temperatures can heat up tempers and the thermostat may read 87 degrees but the emotional thermostat in the house reads minus 8 because people exploded and then froze themselves in a cold war.
Someone has to - you guessed it! - Break the Ice. Be humble. Make peace. A kiss on the cheek. A kind word. A tentative pat on the shoulder. A whispered "I'm sorry - I just lost it." Or "It wasn't you really. I was still mad that thus and so happened and I took it out on you." If both can begin to thaw, two Frosty the Snowmen can happily melt.
Sometimes relationships stay frozen for years. A friendship can die because of envy, betrayal, or misunderstandings. Over the years, when you think of him or her, you realize that in your head that person is the same as he or she was fifteen or twenty years ago. Then you run into him or her at a School Reunion. Wow! How they've changed! Maybe they have. Maybe you have, too.
Or, there's someone you see daily or weekly, and in your mind that person is frozen into "that Grinch". And suddenly , unexpectedly, he or she says something truly compassionate or sensitive and you realize - I didn't know him/her half as well as I thought I did. You still wouldn't up his status to being as good as one of Santa's elves, but he's not bad enough to get coal in his stocking either.
When we go through a traumatic experience, we can stay emotionally frozen in that experience for a long time. It keeps happening over and over again in our minds. The pain seems as fresh and deep as if it just happened. We can't get over it, can't get past it. We live in an overwhelming, blinding, snowstorm of grief.
Time can never heal us. But time can show us that there are still people for us to love and who love us. Time can remind us that our loved one would want us to continue on and come alive again. We can stumble out of the storm and begin to grow warm and responsive in the sunlight of love.
Sometimes being frozen can be a good thing, like a walk in the winter dark when the stars are small furnaces in the sky, and your breath is a beautiful silver plume in the air, and your hair and his are covered in snowflakes sparkling like jewels. A kiss under those stars is magical - cold lips suddenly beautifully warm from the touch of a loved one's mouth.
I remember the joy of going to Chestnut Hill Park as a child and later with my children - being red-cheeked, shouting with the excitement of going tobogganing or sledding down swooping hills, sometimes falling off and rolling in a shuddery-cold white carpet of snow, then going to the lodge to bask by the huge fireplace while drinking sweet, hot, cocoa.
May we all treasure those Winter miracles and memories of love and grace.
With each new season we enjoy, God is saying "Behold! I make all things new!" (Revelation 21:5.) The landscape is new, the struggles and the joys are new, the opportunities to discover God in each experience, person, and place are new.
There can also be new seasons in our hearts, when frozen anguish is replaced by joy, frozen bitterness is replaced by healing, frozen hatred is replaced by forgiveness. Unlike God's seasons, these miracles only happen when there is a revolution in our hearts to parallel the revolution of the earth around the sun. God, Living Light, is waiting to bring these new seasons to birth in us, to thaw everything that is frozen in us, to bring us into Springtime blossom. We just have to offer up our icicle hearts and ask.