By Lindsay Christerson
In my middle age, I have become obsessed with warmth. I wear “house shoes” constantly. The seat warmer is on 365 days a year (mostly for my sore, middle-aged back). As soon as fall hits, I crave a latte warming my whole body from within. I love a hot bath. I don’t mean a pleasantly warm bath—I mean sweaty, raise your heart rate, close your exercise ring for the day kind of bath. I love feeling the chill fall away and heat me all the way to my core. I crave this sensation.
I also—bizarrely—do my deepest thinking in the bath, which is inconvenient since books and writing materials are not easy to use over a small body of water. But I find myself scribbling down connections that the Spirit is making in my heart, quotes that are deeply profound to my mind, and writing some deep heart thoughts on God, grief, and goodness while sweating and soaking. It would be more convenient for “my spot” to be a comfy chair or sitting at my desk on my computer, but I will take what I can get.
It was in my spot, in the cold of January that the Lord gave me this paragraph in the book I currently keep by the bath to inch my way through.
“Where the Spirit is there is always summer,” wrote William Tyndale, for “there are always good fruits that is to say good works.” Tyndale was not just picking any old image at random—the warmth of the Spirit’s summer is important, for just as the spirit first makes us warm with life by turning our heartland their desires to Christ, so he continues to warm us. The new life the Spirit gives is a life of warmth, for it is his own life of delighting in the Father and the Son, and he rears us up precisely by warming our hearts to them.”
—Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity
My wheels started turning about what the ideas of cold and warm bring to mind in our collective consciousness. “The Cold Shoulder.” “I’m warming up to the idea.” “Left me out in the cold.” “This girl is on fire.” “I got sunshine on a cloudy day. When it’s cold outside, I got the month of May.” In general, something that is warm is full of life and vibrant, pliable, and changeable. Something that is cold seems hard, stiff, stagnant, and lifeless.
Think about how often one of the manifestations of God or descriptions of the Spirit used in scripture that are described with a warm connotation:
“Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
— Genesis 2:7
“And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.”
— Exodus 3:2
“And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.”
— Exodus 13:21
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
— John 1:14
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
— John 8:12
“When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.”
— Acts 2:1-4
Breath, fire, flesh and light. The nearness of these things cannot make you cold; they can only warm you. Remember in Narnia when it was winter for so very long. Aslan arrives, the cold melts away and the vibrance of summer arrives:
“Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”— C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
And when he comes to save the lives that the witch has stolen and frozen, he breathes his warm breath on them and they thaw, breathe, and move again.
One more example—warming up. If you start with lifting a heavy weight with cold, stiff muscles you will strain or injure yourself, possibly irreversibly. However, if you warm up first and allow your muscles to become loose and pliable, they are willing to be broken down naturally to be built back up, resulting in increased strength and capacity to handle more weight in the future. When you warm-up, the same exact movement doesn’t cause pain and injury, but allows growth and benefit.
I am not wanting to oversimplify life. The time we spend on this earth is complicated. The experiences we go through are complex and unique. Sometimes when we take on life circumstances and pressures, we do so without being warmed by the Spirit, and the results are different than they could be.
The same worry that we could have seen the Lord show up and meet our needs, instead causes us to spiral into anxiety. When we come up against the same habitual temptation, we could see the way out that the Lord provides instead of giving in to it again. The same compliment that could puff us up and make us prideful in our own talents could be an opportunity to praise the Lord for his goodness and blessings. The same quiet time, same blessing, same mundane task, same trial, same sermon, same bad news, same failure, same comparison— when warmed by an in-the-moment awareness of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in our hearts and his warming us to the beauty and love of Christ could make our experience of this world and this life that can feel like it is “always winter and never Christmas,” (C.S. Lewis) into a spiritual summer.
The same life circumstances that could feel like death by a thousand cuts, can be used to rebuild and rewire our hearts for our benefit— our increased spiritual growth, our seeing the Lord’s glory in increasing degrees, and participation in the kingdom’s flourishing.
I don’t know about you, but when I am warmed past a certain degree, my face lights up. I get bright red and stay that way. When Moses came in close proximity to the Lord’s glory, his face lit up too. (Exodus 34:29)
“Now if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such glory that the Israelites could not gaze at Moses’ face because of its glory, which was being brought to an end, will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory?
But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:7,8,16-18
We are in the thick of winter and there are some very dark, dreary, cold, stiff, possibly even frozen days ahead. My prayer is that as I crave warmth and seek it out with fervor—that the feeling of thawing, the comfort of cozy, and the glow of being warm to the very core of my being—that the warmth would remind me that my heart longs to delight in Christ and to be a light to a dark world as I am being transformed into His image from one degree of glory to the next.
The ultimate warming comfort is knowing that one day, when the dwelling place of the Lord is once again with us, “and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light.” (Revelation 22:5) When God is our only source of light, being “warmed to the core” will take on a whole new meaning, and just like all sorrow and all our tears, the cold will be no more.
Stay warm, sisters.
