Coming back to life?

(original image courtesy SPH @ Flickr)

I don’t know when I started hating winter. All I know is I went from mild ambivalence in my childhood and teens (with the occasional snowman or angel) to wanting to spend the period of time between Christmas and, say, Holy Week either holed up in a well-heated house or lounging on a beach in the Bahamas. Anywhere but here.

I think it began once I became responsible for my own transportation. When you’re relying on someone else to get you places, you don’t have to worry about things like digging the car out of a snowbank. It’s my opinion that cleaning up after the weather should only need to be done after major catastrophes, not as a way of life. We didn’t make the slushy, bitter cold mess, after all. Why should we have to clean it up?

I’ll never quite understand the people who live for this time of year – skiiers, snowmobilers and the like. I’ve done some cross-country skiing a few times, although the last time I tried, I ended up falling forward, knocking the wind out of myself, and bruising my ribs. Suffice it to say, it’ll probably be a while before I try again. Otherwise, I just can’t see the appeal of having to dress in layers to do things in the snow that would be much easier done on dry, non-precipitated-upon land.

Since the time change, we’ve actually had some mild weather, and the snow has begun to melt. Although today we’re back to the sub-freezing chill (and I’m told we’re supposed to get some more of the white stuff tonight), it’s been enough to turn my mind to thoughts of spring – or, as it’s known in Maine, “mud season.”

It’s been a strange week since the “spring forward.” It began for me with stomach flu – probably the same stuff Carla’d had the previous week. I watched all three Godfather movies. My diet subsisted of blandness until I could hold down normal food. One positive is that I managed to lose a few pounds. You may soon see me on the talk show circuit hawking my new book “Lose Weight on the Saltines and Water Diet!”

The steady process of “getting better” has seemed to me an interesting parallel to the snow melting and revealing the ground underneath. In the same way, I’ve been less actively disinterested in spiritual things lately. Which is not to say I’m back to being Mr. Good Christian Daily Bible Reader Praying For All Things again (if, indeed, I ever was that), but it’s a small start to just feel like there’s some kind of hope in something again. I recently listened to a podcast of an old interview with the late Mike Yaconelli, talking about his book Messy Spirituality. He told a story of a seemingly unteachable young Sunday school student who kept sleepwaking through anything spiritually significant he’d learn. Later on in life, he caught up with his old teacher and told him (or her…I’m fuzzy on the details) that he hadn’t shared all the difficulty he had in his younger days (divorce and drug addiction were tearing the family apart), but even if he had only seemed to give 60% spiritually, 60% was 100% of what he had to give. That sounds all too familiar lately…

And yet, even as our house seems to be falling apart, our hearts are still in disarray after this whole adoption setback, and the cold winds blow once again, there’s some kind of hope for a new beginning.