This Bleak Midwinter
“Ah distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December…” · Edgar Allan Poe
“When the winds of winter threaten, I know He’ll keep me safe and warm.” · Robert Edgar Nugent
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There’s a real mood about winter. It’s very contradictory: equal parts cozy and melancholy. The same season that gives us quiet nights around the fireplace with family also gives us the ominous hush of lonely snowfall on an abandoned street. It can take an ordinary moment and make it either rapturous or uncanny, alive with joy or eerily liminal.
There’s also something weirdly transcendent about being warm while in a cold place. Driving through a snowy road is fun when the heater is on, and a cold house isn’t too bad when you can sit in front of a fireplace. I will never tire of sitting at a frosty window in a coffee shop during a snowstorm with a cozy, cable-knit sweater and a hot drink in my hand.
It might be because I have some positively Norman Rockwell-ian, wonderfully quaint memories of being a kid and gearing up in my warmest clothes to go outside in the snow. I’m not sure why there aren’t readily available snow pants for adults, but I remember shoving my legs into those sweaty things till my knees could barely bend, then struggling to zip up my coat, fingers hindered by thick gloves, before bounding outside into the cold to meet my friends on the sledding hill. The snow and ice were brutal on skin, but I was insulated and protected from it. I always felt this weird primal pride of having conquered nature.
I think we’ve all had the moments playing in the snow, though, where we suddenly realized we walked too far from home and didn’t listen to our body soon enough, and now we’re a long walk away with freezing appendages. Even that’s not too bad of a walk, though, when you know you have some place to go. I imagine there’s a terror to a cold winter if you know you have to sleep outside, but when you have a warm home to travel to, the winter holds a little less dread.
This is true of the Christian life. This world is a blustery, gray winter — it’s full of moments of joy that are balanced out by lonely, frozen-foot trudges. But confidence in Christ’s gentle care can give us the same fearlessness about the world we felt as kids going out into the snow or rain. We may get wet shoes or cold fingers, but at the end of the day we know we’ll end up at home with a hot bath and fresh socks. We can venture into the cold of the winter world because we’re insulated by the knowledge that it’s not our home, that even when the winds of winter threaten and the seasons change with a troubling restlessness, He will keep us safe and warm and, eventually, see us home.
What I like about this song is that it doesn’t deny that the winter winds will threaten or that the seasons do change with a jarring restlessness, rather it affirms amidst life’s winter that I have a warm and steady refuge in Christ. This song was written by our own Robert Nugent a couple decades ago and I love that the truth of it still holds up — Christ is the peace that still endures.
It’s not that I never have to crunch through the gray, winter landscapes, but the peace comes from knowing that the winter is only temporary — I’m just passing through this world. And while snow and salty slush are irritating by February or March, we know that spring is just around the corner, and in the meantime, we are clothed in the warmth of Christ’s righteousness. Soon enough flowers will bloom and rain will wash away the road salt. The morning star will dawn and all will be warm and right again, just like the first spring thaw after a brutal winter.
Written by: Danny Nathan, Worship Director