Experiencing a Good Winter

A good winter? Is there such a thing? Like only experiencing “pressure” when you go to the dentist, a good winter seems quite the oxymoron. “Yes there was a tad bit of pressure when you injected that needle in my gums. Thanks for the heads up.”

Winter is harsh, unending, and unmerciful – at least in most places. As I sit in 80 degree California weather, not so much. But I remember well the Colorado mornings during adolescence, desperately attempting to scrape ice off my front windshield before my lungs shattered like the ice I was trying unsuccessfully to remove. Every breathe feeling like tiny icicle daggers were lodging themselves in the back of my throat. Oh yes I remember those winter mornings well, and I would not describe them as good.

Spring is the life of the party with flowers blossoming, birds chirping and grass growing. Winter is the season specifically designed to kill everything. What a Debbie-Downer. So how can winter actually be good?

A GOOD WINTER? BON IVER

Bon Iver is a music group, originally headed by one guy named Justin Vernon. In 2007 Bon Iver busted onto the music scene out of nowhere – literally. No band, no label, no record deal, just Justin singing his heart out in a cabin in the middle of Wisconsin.

The story of how Justin found himself at this place started with brokenness – his band broke up, his girlfriend Emma broke up with him, which broke him, as that kind of breaking usually does. Then his body officially broke, as he contracted mono.

So Justin left; left town, left his band, his friends, left the spot at the park he and Emma used to go, their pasta dish they shared every Tuesday – just left, pain and questions why – his only luggage. That and his guitar.

He went to a Wisconsin cabin in the dead of winter for three months and put all his questions into nine tracks of brutal beauty, offering it to her, For Emma, Forever Ago. Calling the experience and himself, Bon Iver, which is a slight variation for the French phrase, Good Winter.

“I…went up there because I didn’t know where else to go and I knew that I wanted to be alone and I knew that I wanted to be where it was cold.” – Justin Vernon

 

TRANSFORMATIVE WINTER

If there is no winter there is no spring, as death has to precede life. We know this. But it does not make the bitter cold any more enjoyable. As I listen to Justin sing over and over in the video below… What might have been lost, what might have been lost, someday my pain, someday my pain, I have to admit I can’t help but get a little teary-eyed.

My tears are for him, for the pain that breathed those words. My tears are for my own winter years ago when a love relationship I had was breaking up and I was breaking. A love relationship not with Emma, but with God.

I wrote for three years my own 160 page song of sorts that I titled To Be Determined.  Every answer felt pending, every truth out of reach. I was immersed in indefinable’s, hoping each word typed would bring definition. To be Determined. For God, Peace Forever Ago.

“Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each more clearly, to see the very ground of our being.”  – Parker Palmer

But in my winter, pain birthed truth.

Questions, wisdom.

Loneliness, with an understanding of how real God’s love is as He met me on those bitter cold nights with a warm blanket.

I wrote, praying each word would bring life. And without fanfare, the frozen ground once only filled with decay, sprouted new green shoots, flowers forming in places that would’ve been unimaginable just months before. Winter became spring.

So if you’re sitting in what feels like an unending winter right now, know that God can turn a harsh winter into a beautiful spring.

Man Vs Wild

His name is Bear Grylls. That’s right, Grizzly-Bear, “Throw-the-Steaks-on-the” Grylls. If his name were Man Manlison, he wouldn’t be manlier.

Bear Grylls started in the British special forces, climbed Mt. Everest at 23 years old (after he broke his back in three places), circumnavigated the United Kingdom on a jet ski and survives the harshest environments imaginable in the television show, Man Vs. Wild. If you haven’t seen this show on the Discovery Channel, your heart has a giant Bear-shaped-hole aching to be filled.

In the most memorable of episodes, Bear is in the desert and comes up to a pile of elephant dung. Bear then explains that elephant dung contains water. Bear is in the sweltering desert and quite thirsty. Bear picks up the elephant dung and hovers it over his mouth…No, please Bear. Don’t do it! Borrow some water from the camera guy…Nooo!!!

THE DESERT

I feel like Bear Grylls most days. Not in manliness. (No one’s calling me Panther). No, I feel like I got dropped off in the desert, but my camera crew forgot about me. The desert for me has been unemployment, a lack of purpose, a shortage of any real tangible success I can hold on to. Opportunities galore seemingly up for grabs, and yet, my hands stuck in pockets full of super glue.

The one dream I tried the hardest to turn into a desert-oasis, having a non-fiction manuscript published titled, Are You My Life?: Searching for Self, Faith, and a Freaking Job. The book — sorry I mean the manuscript, is my frank, funny, and authentic story of faith, identity, and purpose. I specify manuscript because book means you’ve made it — manuscript means, keep dreaming. If someone’s reading your book, they bought it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If someone’s reading your manuscript, they’ve just stolen your computer from your coffee shop seat when you went to relieve yourself, and while waiting for the pawnshop owner, the hoodlum perused the first page.

For months and months and months my manuscript made it to the hands of many different publishers. And for months and months I prayed my phone would ring with a congratulations from someone else other than a timeshare salesman in regards to a prize I could claim, “If you’ll just come down and hear a short presentation.”

Unfortunately, he was the only one.

So why me and why the desert? Well maybe the answer’s in the Bible. Crazy, I know.

DESERT-REDEMPTION

Throughout the arc of the Bible countless people are forced to the desert. Not just metaphorically as people like me like to complain, but literally in the burning sand and vultures waiting for you to become well-done.

It started with Adam and Eve – the starkest of all desert experiences as paradise must of played in their dreams every night. Then there was Abraham, David, even Jesus was “led by the Spirit” to spend forty days and forty nights alone in the desert. Jesus, the original Bear Grylls?

Then of course there’s Moses and the entire Jewish population in their little jaunt through the wasteland. But Moses just didn’t spend forty years in the desert, he spent eighty! Before leading the Israelites he spent forty years prior with the Midians in “a dry and arid place,” similar to the desert he’d lead his people through. As Os Hillman writes,

The desert was a place of preparation for one of the greatest assignments given to one man. Did you hear what I just said? Yes, the desert was the place of preparation. Moses was battle-trained in the same environment he would spend another forty years to bring a stubborn and willful people out of slavery.

What kind of assignment is God preparing you for? Does He have you in the desert of preparation? Learn well the lessons you are there to learn. You may find you are called   to be a deliverer, just like Moses.

This gives me solace and hope as I feel forgotten, sweaty and unable to swallow. Maybe God’s not punishing us desert-dwellers, he’s preparing? Maybe God’s purpose for you — like Moses, can only be forged in the difficult, in the dire. There’s something significant that happens to us when we are void of what we depended on.  As Dallas Willard writes,

All great works are prepared in the desert, including redemption of the world. The precursors, the followers, the Master himself, all obeyed or have to obey one and the same law. Prophetic, Apostles, preachers, martyrs, pioneers of knowledge, inspired artist  in every art, ordinary men and the Man-God, all pay tribute to loneliness, to the life of  silence, to the night.”

No water, no food, and no shade, it’s easy to die in the desert. No doubt about it. When we’re eyeing a heaping pile of elephant poop to stay alive, it puts things in perspective. But if we can trust God to keep us alive in the desert, in the most unlivable, I think we can trust Him to keep us alive anywhere.

“Behold I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth…I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Isaiah 43:19