Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God…

So begins the first reading of today’s liturgy and my first reading of the day… when I first read it, many different images all came to mind and heart. Some of them were from the news…the tents down the street, soldiers walking the streets in different places around the world, wounded children…

And then I moved to my second reading from a beautiful Advent book given to me by a friend, All Creation Waits. For the 24 days leading to Christmas, I read about a different animal and its practices of waiting…of preparing and moving through the cold into spring once again. Today was Wood Frog.

…Because his sun has gone out. His arteries and veins are frozen canals, the spaces between his cells filled with ice crystals. His summer-supple skin has turned crunchy. His heart is silent as a stone. Not even the weakest current crackles in his brain. And he is not dead. He is what scientists call “extreme tolerant.’

Somehow the pairing of texts seem to work for me.

When I began to wonder about how to give comfort, what words to speak tenderly to the world that is in such a state of turmoil and chaos, I thought of the wood frog—who is not dead, in spite of outward appearance. I thought of the extreme-tolerant wood frog….whose sun has gone out. I wondered whether the frog has the instinct to know that spring will return? Or does it simply go into its evolutionary mode and act on base self-preservation? “This is not safe for me…by shutting down, I might survive…”

Except no one, nothing, can be extreme tolerant forever. For life to continue with any sort of cycle or meaning, the sun must return for each of us.

And sometimes it is the comfort of words spoken with tenderness and the warmth of actions offered with love that serve as reminders of what the sun does for us as it thaws our frozen selves and offers the promise of life once again. How much easier to move, to live with meaning and purpose, when not simply tolerating the extremity of the season, no matter how endless it might seem.

May we each in our own unique ways offer that comfort and tenderness to our world. The sun will rise and a new day will dawn and life will once again flow in veins with ease and possibility. Until then, we who can must keep watch over what is waiting to emerge that remains hidden beneath and within, keep watch over that which sustains the extreme without giving in to it entirely.

May this be so Now, in our world, our time, through your inspiration and intervention, and with our help. Amen.