I have believed in God for as long as I can remember. That is not the interesting part of this story.
The interesting part is that for most of my life, my faith and my daily routine ran on two separate tracks. I went to church. I prayed. And then I got on with the week, and the week went fast, and by Friday I could not have told you a single place I had noticed God working.
Life moves quickly. Heartache, grief, loss, the ordinary difficult things. Those moments turn into hours, then days, and then you look up and a season has gone by. I rarely stopped long enough to see Him in action, and I definitely did not recognize it in the moment.
Then came a January where I had nothing to do but stop.
The morning everything changed
I heard the first sounds around four in the morning. My honest first thought was gunfire, which tells you something about living rurally in north Mississippi.
It was not gunfire. It was ice.
Around seven, our neighbor knocked and asked if we had power. We did not. Then she said, look outside.
I opened the door and heard it again. A crack, and then a pine tree loaded with ice came down and threw up a spray of ice and dirt when it hit. I turned to go back in out of the wind and realized there was a tree, with a second one attached to it, lying across our roof.
That was day one of seven without power.
What I learned about my own faith
Here is what I discovered about myself that week, and I am not especially proud of it.
When life is comfortable, I say I trust God. When life is not comfortable, I find out whether that was true.
By the third night we had no heat, no food, and no propane. It was dark early and it was cold in a way that gets into your bones. And I remember sitting there and asking, out loud, where are You?
For a long time I would have been embarrassed by that question. I thought a strong believer sat quietly and felt peaceful.
I have changed my mind. That question was not the opposite of faith. It was faith, in its rawest form. You do not call out to someone you have already decided is not listening.
The answers were not the ones I ordered
I wanted the power back on. That was my request, and it was very specific.
Instead, my husband drove into town looking for propane, found the whole town dark and closed, and came home with hamburgers from the one restaurant that had lights on. Enough for us and six of our neighbors.
Instead, a man we barely knew who had stopped by earlier on his side by side ended up sending Dan home with a full propane tank that kept us warm for two more days.
Instead, a stranger I have never met heard through a friend of a friend that we were about to lose all our frozen food, and offered us his empty freezer.
None of it was what I asked for. All of it was an answer.
I have come to believe God rarely removes the storm. He sends people into it.
What I would say to you
If your faith has been running on a separate track from your actual life, you are in very good company. Mine did for years.
You probably do not need a crisis to fix that. What you need is the habit of looking. Not for the dramatic answer, but for the propane tank, the neighbor, the phone call that came at the right moment.
Start counting those. You will be surprised how long the list gets.
That is really what God & Ice is. It is what I wrote down during the week I finally slowed down enough to notice, and the phrase that repeats through the whole book is simply this: I was looking for You, and then, I found You.
Call to Action: God & Ice is my account of that week, written as it happened rather than tidied up afterward. If you would like to read the whole story, you can find the book here.
