Today I was partially oblivious to my situation.

I was on my way to a meeting and it wasn’t until I got into the building and the typical Canadian discussion about the cold began that I realized the temperature outside was -41′ Celsius.

It surprised me. Not because the temperature doesn’t get that cold often (it can and does), or that people were tired of the winter weather (we are). Those things are a given conversation and experience here in the Canadian Prairies.

What surprised me was that I hadn’t external or internalized the cold. That is unheard of for me. I’m cold approximately 8 months out of the year. My husband believes that part of the reason I married him was that he maintains a high natural body temperature at all times.  (He does, and it may have played a role. We’ve come to a place of acceptance over this issue.)

Now, you may ask, why this uncharacteristic lack of shivering despair as I trundled, bundled, out to my slowly warming van?

I don’t know. But I have my suspicions. Sometimes there are situations in our lives that come out of left field and surprise us. The unexpected and unwarranted confrontation, the change, the shift, the move. Situations where we turn towards this new intrusion into our life with laser-eyed focus, all consumed by the disruption.

It’s not that there was a situation in my life that was unexpected. It was my response to it.

I had been challenged, unfairly, I believe, and was processing my way through. Now, normally I would do one of two things, I would curl up like an armadillo and glare woundedly out of slitted eyes, or, I would sing “Holla Back Girl” while dancing and waving around my flat-iron. The latter was the impulse response of the day.

But that wasn’t where it remained. By the time I had moved on from ‘Holla Back Girl’ to “Two Story Town”, God had intervened with his still voice of reminder and reason.

“Is this the stance you want to take? Do you want to go militant or do you want to remember who I’ve created you to be and how I see you?”

All the good lessons I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks about who I am in God’s eyes came flooding back and I repented and changed my approach. I would focus on God and who he is, and that cleared away the stiffness and resistance. I was able to remember who I was and settle into a place of peace.

Maybe that start to the day kept me warmer, or maybe God had another focus in mind for me on my drive. A focus on him, on the goodness in the world, and the beauty around me.

As I crested the hill by my house I saw a sun dog. If you haven’t seen a sun dog, it shows up as a curved rainbow that brackets the sun on either side. It has to be cold, it has to be clear in order to see them. And when you do, it’s glorious.

Our God is a god who can make rainbows glow in the midst of the coldest winter.

When I looked at this unexpected beauty in the frigidly blue Prairie sky, I thought about the promise God made in the book of Genesis.

“As long as the earth endures,

seedtime and harvest,

cold and heat,

summer and winter,

day and night will never cease.” Genesis 8:22

I thought about God as a keeper of promises. I thought about this verse and how it covers absolutely everything, every situation, every fruit and ever famine.

Our God is a promise keeper in the midst of new dreams and endings, in coldness and warmth, dryness and floods. 

There have been many situations in my life where if I’d known some of the slings and arrows that were going to come my way, I would have not-so-graciously bowed out. But He kept his promises and I would never change the opportunity to have seen his faithfulness to me.

There are situations I’ve gone into where I couldn’t see my way through. Where I thought there would be crumbs for me as I looked at the feast set before another. But he kept his promises and I would never change the lessons I learned about trusting him and his continual and imaginative provision.

There have been situations where I have gone in expecting joy and found more joy than I could have fathomed. He kept his promises about life abundant in him.

God keeps his promises. There is nowhere too cold or bleak where he can’t get to us. There is no heart to hard and broken that he can’t soften. There is no flood that he can’t use to bring restoration.

He is not a fair-weather keeper of promises. He is with us in the trenches, in the kitchens, in the commutes, in the meetings and at the bedsides. He is with us in the glory and the despair. His mercies and glories are new every morning.

How many times have I missed the quiet fulfilment of his promises as I concentrated on the hardship around me?

When I remember to keep my focus on him, his glory has made all other things fade away. Focussing on the glowing rainbow of promise, keeping my eyes on him in the midst of any and all situations, that’s where I remember what sustains me.

 

 

 

Thanks to Gayle Loewen for the SunDog image. Check out more of her work here.