Cold and Chill Bless the Lord!

“I can’t feel my feet,” a guest says to me as he stands on the front porch of Manna House. He is wearing worn out running shoes with mesh uppers. The cold has settled in for a few days on the edge of the polar vortex. Memphis has temperatures in the low twenties, and wind that is cutting.

            Another guest tells me, “My hands are numb.” He has on thin cloth gloves. A few other early arriving guests appear out of nowhere as I unlock the gate and the front door. They are all bundled in various ways against the cold, but one sums up the state they are in, "My bones are frozen."

            It is early. The darkness of the night has not given way to the light of the morning. I have arrived to get the house ready for hospitality before we open at 8am. There’s laundry to be folded. The supplies for serving coffee need to be set up. And I would really like some time to read and pray and write before opening. I relish the quiet time in the house alone. It is sacred time.

            But when I go past the few gathering guests and open the door to Manna House, I can feel the contrast between the warmth inside and the freezing cold outside. When I cross the threshold, the image of “The Christ of the Breadline” flashes in my mind. Christ is behind me waiting, freezing on the front porch.

            I say to myself, “Christ is going to have to wait a few minutes.” I have a few things I have to get done before I can open the house for hospitality. But I make the list shorter and ten minutes later I open the front door and invite in the Christ of the front porch. By then eight people have gathered and they all hurry in thankful for the warmth.

            One man heads for a couch and a few minutes later he is asleep. Another sits down and gets a book out of his backpack and begins to read. A few others gather around the table in the front room and talk about nothing in particular. It will be another hour or so before we will be “open” and start the showers and serve hot coffee.

            I take a chair at the door of the kitchen and open my prayer book. I am searching for a prayer I know from the Morning Office. I want to pray into the reality of the cold. The prayer comes from the Book of Daniel (chapter 3), where three young men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are tossed into a blazing furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar because they won’t worship idols. In that furnace, “heated to seven times its usual fire,” the three young men sing God’s praises. Maybe in all that heat they really appreciated the cold.

"Bless the Lord all you works of the Lord,
Praise and exalt God above all forever.
Cold and chill, bless the Lord;
    praise and exalt God above all forever.
Frost and chill, bless the Lord;
    praise and exalt God above all forever.
Ice and snow, bless the Lord;
    praise and exalt God above all forever.”

            The prayer makes me wonder how to pray in the midst of a cold that threatens the lives of our guests. Then again, is it the cold that is threatening, or is it the coldness of our culture that deems some expendable, some not “worthy” of shelter, of housing? Maybe we “bless the Lord” in the midst of cold by offering hospitality to those out in the cold? Better still, maybe we “bless the Lord” by becoming the kind of community where we can all enjoy the cold because we have warm places to be with each other, no one is left outside, no one is left behind. Maybe we “bless the Lord” when we recognize each other and the whole of God’s creation as the very presence of God.