The Big Storm of '09

Last year I took both of the congregations I serve through a series of what we called “cottage meetings.” The people gathered by small groups in private homes for an evening of sharing around the following questions, which came to me from a long-forgotten source as “Quaker Questions:”
1.Where did you live between the ages of 8 and 13, and what were the winters like?
2.How was your home heated during that time?
3.What was the center of warmth in your home during that time? (It could be a place, person, or time of day)
4.When did God become a “warm person” to you, and how did it happen?
Over the years I’ve learned to expect both conventional and surprising results from those questions, and this year was no exception. One thing that kept coming up was that most of us remembered winters as being more severe when we were growing up than we have experienced lately.

Of course I found myself wondering how much of that was accurate and how much the effect of the passing of time, blizzards and snowdrifts increasing in our memory until they assume nearly mythical proportions. Dylan Thomas, in his beautiful memoir, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, writes, “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” After all, we only have snow at Christmas about half the time in Iowa, yet our memories all tend to be of white Christmases.

Well. This is turning out to be a real old-fashioned Iowa winter with two- and three-day blizzards, messing up travel plans, forcing churches to cancel services—this is the first time I can remember canceling Christmas Eve services in 30+ years of ministry—and straining the already-strained budgets of towns, counties, businesses and churches as we cope with finding places for all the snow.

Interestingly, all the people I’ve talked to, even the family who went without electricity for three days, seem to be taking it all in stride, finding things to celebrate and be thankful for in the middle of some mighty serious weather. We talked, we read, we huddled together for warmth, we shoveled and scraped and ran snowblowers, and in spite of everything, we enjoyed Christmas.

As pastors, this weather makes our jobs harder in some ways, but it may force us to spend a little more time reading, reflecting, and even planning. And I guess that brings me back to the point I was making a few weeks ago: learn to adapt to what’s happening in your world, and you might find that God is giving you an opportunity.