The power went out a little after 7:30 Saturday morning. It’s a bit alarming to lose your lifeline on a day when the temperature dips below -10 Fahrenheit.
Fortunately for my calm, the electric company immediately predicted its crew could restore power by 10:30. I am grateful for the crew that built this house almost 14 years ago; in the first 90 minutes of the outage, the internal temperature dropped only 3 degrees, so I knew if the electricity was indeed restored by 10:30, in a worst-case scenario it would still be a mostly comfortable 62 degrees in the house.
The power went on at 9:15 for about 5 seconds, and then it came back for good at 9:25. I am grateful for a company that gives an estimate and then is able to complete the job a full hour early, on a weekend. That is customer service.
Meanwhile, the people who make forecasts say the temperature won’t rise about 10 degrees until Thursday, and maybe it will hit 20 on Sunday. White and brown are the dominant colors this time of year; I miss green. The first day of spring is less than two months away, so I’m practicing my patience.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 22: 37-40
There is a path forward through the strife and the chaos of the present day, and it is summed up in the second law — “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Our society has a big problem with the first law, “Love your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” How can we be sure of things unseen and all that.
But your neighbor is right in front of you, or right next door, or across the street, or in the next county, or on the other side of the world.
Your neighbor is chanting slogans or resting in homeless shelters. Your neighbor is a thief on the cross or a sullen clerk behind a counter. I may not know how to solve their troubles, but I can treat them with love.
Love is a commitment, not an emotion. Love is respect and treating others with dignity, even when perhaps they don’t seem to deserve it. Paul said it for the ages: Love is patient and kind and doesn’t tally offenses.
The path forward is to do all things with love, and in the name of the Lord. And there’s the big problem again: “Who is this Lord? How dare you claim to speak of one true God?” Fair question.
In our heart of hearts, we seek peace, and peace is found in loving our neighbors, treating all we meet with love. It seems to me that a God of peace, who encourages us to love above all else, and whose defining act was to die for humanity in the name of love, must be the one true God.
Somewhere in space is a planet full of peaceful beings — they are boring in our sight because they live in peace with one another.
Our stories are about conflict and the clash of ideas and cultures — Not much space for peace in our space. I mean, what kind of fight could you have when everyone is willing to live and let live?
It makes you just want to punch someone in the face, except that’s no way to live in peace.
Out my window I can see the spot where I plan to build a fire circle in the spring, so that during the summer we can sit and watch the flames while making s’mores and telling stories and singing the songs we might have sung around a campfire.
They — the people who make a living forecasting such things — say today may be as cold as can be, with the high temperature remaining below zero Fahrenheit and wind chills in very nasty territory.
One of them even said it might be the coldest day ever recorded in Wisconsin. My memory is long enough to know that can’t be true.
I recall a stretch during my freshman year in college, 54 (!) years ago, where the temperatures were in the neighborhood of 20 below zero for several days. I also remember the day when the cold snap broke.
The sun was shining and the wind was calm. Everything looked beautiful in the crisp cool air as I walked across campus. I had bundled up for the temperatures of the previous few days, and as I strolled along I realized I didn’t need quite so many layers, so I loosened the scarf and unzipped my outer coat.
As I walked down the hill at the edge of campus and the bank in the center of downtown came into view, I saw the electronic sign that flashed the time and temperature 24 hours a day, to see just how warm the air had become.
It was 6 degrees below zero. It had been so cold that -6 felt like a heat wave.
In that moment I realized that I had become an authentic resident of the great state of Wisconsin. The Green Bay Packers had won the NFL championship 70 miles to the north on an afternoon when the temperature was -13, which had occurred a little more than four years earlier, and now I knew a little something about how that day must have felt.
When the sun rises today, and again tomorrow morning, the meteorologists say it will be about 17 below. This afternoon’s high is expected to be around 6 below, the same as that sunny morning all those years ago.
So I know I can live through it. But I don’t think I’m going for any walks today. And I’m really looking forward to that fire circle.
It’s a few minutes after I finished writing about blogging for 2,000 consecutive days, and as promised I now begin crafting number 2,001.
I’ve been deeply affected by the passage from James’ letter that my friend the pastor preached about the past two Sundays, about boasting about plans when nothing comes to pass unless the Lord wills it. “Thy will be done” is a great and apt prayer.
If, as I mentioned yesterday, I live as long as my father did, I have about 23 years left to finish whatever impact I’m going to have in this world. At the same time, I have no guarantee that I will live long enough to finish this 2,001st blog post. His will be done.
Wait, does that mean it was God’s will that I watch eight episodes of “Homeland” on Monday night and deprive myself of a few hours’ sleep? It was God’s will that someone died in a car crash, or it was God’s will that some idiot loser murdered a bunch of people including innocent children? Why would an all-powerful God allow fatal accidents, or why would an all-powerful God allow people to do stupid or evil things?
I don’t know. I think it might have something to do with God honoring our choices. I think it has something to do with the old saw, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” We do stupid things; evil people commit evil; we learn and grow.
We go through life making plans, and the things we plan become reality if it’s God’s will. Sometimes our plans don’t become reality because God has a better idea. That song “Bless the Broken Road” is about finding a true love who wouldn’t have been found without a series of missteps along the journey. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
And so this meandering comprises the 2001st blog post that I hoped to write if it was God’s will. Apparently it was, for better or worse.
Two thousand days is a long, long time. A little calculator manipulation says approximately five years and 175 days have passed since Aug. 1, 2020. That was when I challenged myself to post something — anything — on this blog at least once a day for three months. That 92-day challenge hits 2,000 days today.
Those were dark days. A curtain of oppression had settled over the world. Businesses, schools and even churches were ordered to close, censorship was rampant, and fear mongers shouted warnings from the rooftops, all of it ostensibly because of a virus that proved to be no more or less deadly in lands that did not lower the curtain over their populace — but woe upon you if you dared to say, “Gee, that country isn’t doing all this crap and they seem to be fine.”
Some among us still yearn for those days when dark forces controlled our lives with an iron fist. I hope and pray that in years to come that those days are recalled as a time when the world lost its mind.
It was in the middle of those dark days — and the darkness would spread for a few years before things began to improve — that I gave myself that 92-day challenge. Little did I know that over the next 2,000 days I would lose the love of my life and the best dog there was. Little did I know that I would be playing guitar in a church worship team after letting my instrument sit in a corner for 15 years. Little did I know that in the midst of my empty loneliness, a woman would walk into my life and a friendly hug would be the beginning of a journey that has refilled my heart and renewed my joy of living.
Part of my soul will always be sitting in a chair next to a hospice bed, numb with shock that my partner of 26 years had passed away while I read to her from the gospel of Matthew on my laptop. The focus of my blog and my life began to change when I opened the laptop later and saw that the last words I read to her were from Matthew 22:36-40, about the two greatest commandments.
I figured out a few years ago that if I lived as long as my grandfathers, I would have a total of about 31,000 days on this planet. Then my father managed to live about 4,000 days longer than that.
In any case 2,000 days is a fraction of a lifetime, and yet it feels like a lifetime in itself.
So much has changed, and so much has not changed. I live in the same house, with two golden retrievers, although one is different from the one I had in 2020. The last of our cats passed about two months after my beloved.
I still aspire to write stories — fantastic stories, silly stories, science fiction stories (or perhaps more precisely science fantasy) — or maybe once upon a time I fell in love with the idea of being a storyteller, seeing as I have never maintained a habit of sitting down to write stories every day. This blogging habit has proven that I can write every day, yet having established that fact, I still have not taken the next logical step.
Reaching a milestone is cause for celebration, and I don’t want to dwell on the accomplishment as much as what needs to be accomplished next.
Still, 2,000 days have gone by since the last time a day passed without my adding something to this website. When I set out to blog every day for three months, I hoped I would keep going beyond 92 days, but I was not at all confident I would ever get this far. And so, praise the Lord, and I’ll get started on number 2,001 in a minute.
