Face It

Unfortunately, winter doesn’t always look as gentle and nice as it does here. Apparently, gently falling snow that doesn’t accumulate is reserved for one’s blog.

All day all the weather predictions here have been for ice tonight. The meteorological certainty of this inclement weather has precipitated (no pun intended) an “ice storm warning”. Doesn’t that sound foreboding?

I did go to the grocery this morning and I did buy the obligatory extra gallon of milk and even a couple of jugs of drinking water (I guess in case the power goes out…except, we don’t have an electric pump here, so would we still have running water? I guess the city’s water works could be hampered by a power outage…couldn’t they? Shows what I don’t know…) But beyond that, I’ve not really wanted to face the fact that we might have nasty weather overnight that might inconvenience us more than a little. Hopefully, that will be the extent of any bad weather episode–not endangerment, not a narrow escape–just inconvenience.

This has gotten me thinking about other things that I really don’t want to face. There are inevitabilities in life–they say death and taxes are among them. But there are also things like disappointments, broken relationships, loss, debilitation, sickness–whole hosts of things that we would rather, like the weather, wish to “…go away; come again some other day.”–or not.

All that kind of thinking ends up in a great deal of wasted emotional energy–dread, fretting, checking out the window (figuratively speaking). I can take that approach–or I can face the reality.

The only sure way to face the reality and stay standing (again, figuratively speaking, since sometimes the best position in which to face reality is with my face to the ground, bowed before a sovereign God who loves me and is surprised by not a single second of my reality) is to acknowledge God in the midst of whatever that is. I read somewhere today that sometimes we fail to take God’s power especially, but some of His other attributes as well, into consideration when we face hard things. And that causes us to thrash about and reach for answers, grasp at solutions that are totally unsuitable–simply because we don’t acknowledge Him in that part of our way along the path.

So, I ask myself: What reality in my life am I not facing? With what certainty about the God who fully knows it will I stare it in the eye and say, “Bring it on. With my God, I can….”

I’ll be smiling when I listen to the weather and school closings/delays in the morning.