It Is The Cold I Cannot Face

Rain does not stop you. You have gone out in rain plenty of times and thought nothing of it.

Cold stops you completely.

And you have never examined that, because it does not feel like something that needs examining. It feels like a fact about you, the way being tall is a fact, and facts do not get looked at.

So here is a question that will sound too small to matter. When you think about going out into the cold, what exactly are you picturing?

Not the walk. The moment. The door opening, and the air arriving, and that first involuntary hunch of the shoulders, and the eight or nine seconds where every part of you says no.

That is what stops you. Not twenty minutes of cold. About nine seconds of it, imagined in advance, at four o'clock, from a warm room.

He sendeth out his word and melteth them

There is a small passage in the Psalms about weather that has a striking turn in the middle of it.

He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold? He sendeth out his word, and melteth them: he causeth his wind to blow, and the waters flow. (Psalm 147:17-18, King James Version)

Who can stand before his cold.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is a straight question with an obvious answer, and the answer is nobody, and the Psalm is entirely comfortable saying so.

You are not the only one who cannot stand in front of it, and it was never weakness that made a man flinch at an open door in January. Psalm 147:17 asks who can stand before the cold and expects the answer nobody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as company rather than as an excuse being granted.

And then the turn. He sendeth out his word, and melteth them. The cold does not last, and it is not endured until it gives up. It gets spoken to, and it goes.

You have a cold that is under a word rather than under your endurance, and it was never your resistance that had to outlast it. The written word puts the melting in God's speaking rather than in anybody's toughness, and the Spirit of God is what stops this becoming a test of a man's grit.

Nine seconds is not twenty minutes

Now the practical heart of it, and it is a piece of accounting.

The dread is about two minutes long. The walk is twenty. And they have been priced as the same thing for years.

Here is what actually happens when a person goes out into cold and keeps moving. The first eight or nine seconds are genuinely unpleasant. The next minute is unpleasant and diminishing. And somewhere around minute two, the body has caught up, and after that it is not cold, it is bracing, which is a completely different sensation with a completely different name.

The dread is about two minutes long, and the two minutes are not the same thing as the walk.

You are dreading a fraction of the thing, and it was never twenty minutes that any part of you was refusing. Psalm 147 puts the cold under a word that melts it, which is exactly why the Spirit of God will not let a man mistake nine seconds for an afternoon.

And notice something about the imagining. The picture in your head at four o'clock is always of standing still in the cold. Nobody dreads walking in the cold. They dread the doorway version, which is stationary, and stationary is the one condition under which cold actually wins.

Count it

So here is the practical part and it is deliberately literal, because a number will do more here than encouragement.

Go out into it and count.

Count the seconds from the door until the moment you notice you have stopped thinking about it. Actually count. Say the numbers in your head.

You are able to measure a thing that has only ever been imagined, and it has never once survived being counted. The passage asks a question about the cold and then answers it with a word rather than with endurance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man counting numbers on a sidewalk in January.

Most people come back with something between ninety seconds and three minutes. Whatever your number is, that is now the size of this, and it is not the size it has been in your head for years.

Ten minutes, out and back. Do not add anything to it. Do not go longer to prove something. The counting is the whole assignment.

You are able to keep this at ten minutes and still have done it, and it has never once required a longer walk to have settled anything. Psalm 147:18 sends out the word and the melting follows, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a cold street with somebody who went to find out.