Lord of a Winter's Heart

Man, dude, today proves that I am pretty much like everyone else. Slept 5 minutes too long, which somehow made me 10 minutes late. Kinda sleepy. Beyond grumpy. Blew my horn and almost my top at this guy who only had about 1/4 of his automobile in my lane. Just in a mood. If I was a mood ring I would be amber, but maybe tettering into gray. The gas needed was basically laying in the fetal position so I stopped at Ike's and filled up. As I was standing out in the chill and smelling the scrambled egg mixed with exhaust odor from IHOP a few blocks away I said to myself, "Hey, guess what moody Jane? You have to go up and study Scripture and write about it!" Nice. Nothing like being convicted by your own internal voice. Should he speak so loud so early in the morning? He gets up before I do apparently. Grumble.

Have you ever felt like that? Yeah, who hasn't and who doesn't? Sometimes it takes a night's rest to kinda restart the engine, reboot the hard drive, or cause the sun to rise again. But that's life, ya'll. Even when we feel this way we need to drag our sorry carcass to Jesus, confess our stuff and sit in silence and let him wash it away with his word. That, incidentally, is supposed to be how I interact with Barb. Hmm, more conviction. Yikes. This day is in need of grace and it's quite early yet.

It's in these moments that I need God to come to me more than ever, not to say I don't need him when I'm mood ring blue. I need him to come when I'm not looking for him and not looking forward to seeing him. I need him when I'm disappointed with myself or let down because things aren't running as smoothly as I wish they would. Sometimes being faith-full is a lot harder than being faithful.

And then there was Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, who had been with her husband about the same amount of time I've been with Barb. He died and left her a widow. Luke 2:36-38 says she spent the rest of her life worshiping God, fasting and praying. What do we do when life becomes difficult? Though we are tempted to withdraw and shrink into ourselves we need to place ourselves in the community of faith and in the presence of God, cultivating the soil even when it seems rocky, bumpy or frozen over. So I'm hoping that this frost can thaw under the hand of the Lord of the Winter's Heart.