Winter’s Bitter Bite

I am hearing that December was Chicago’s coldest month in about forty years. It was bitter! But it is not just this winter I feel is cold, it is winter in general. Having spent several years in Alaska as a boy, cold did not affect me much until recently, as my age caught up with me. Lately, I have been looking at winter a little differently, and realized that it is like an annual message from God.

Things have not always been this way, of course. In the first chapters of Genesis, we discover a canopy of vapor in the atmosphere over the earth rendering the entire globe a tropical paradise.  Apparently, it was a balmy 80 degrees everywhere. It is also likely that the vapor blocked much of the damaging rays from the Sun, giving the Earth’s inhabitants longer life.