Faith & Insight: Hope in the dead of winter

C.S. Lewis penned a beautifully heartbreaking line spoken by Mr. Tumnus in the epic book The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. “...always winter but never Christmas...” Try to sense the hopelessness and desperation in his statement. It is a longing for hope and renewal, a longing for warmth.

In Narnia, they have faced one hundred years of winter. Imagine our valley stuck in winter. The ski resorts would be happy, but it would grow old. We are not supposed to live in winter for any longer than it lasts.

Winter ushers in a dead season. The light of day shortens, trees lose their leaves, plants die off, and the little grass in the valley withers. The celebration of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the new year help to ward off the impending winter slump, but it shows up without fail.

Winter makes it easy to fade into a season where bleak existence and muddling through feels uncomfortably comfortable. Some symptoms that cause this are the tendency to be more stagnant in winter, lack of sunlight messes with our serotonin levels, and a drop in our natural neurotransmitters that can cause feelings of depression or sadness.

Winter can bring us what St. John of the Cross calls the Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night of the Soul is a place of utter meaninglessness. A place where we feel like it is always winter and never Christmas in our soul. In the depths of our being is a longing for warmth.

We long for a season that will melt away the figurative snow and ice imprisoning our well-being and forcing us into the mundane. Can it stay winter all the time? Aslan, the true king of Narnia, enters the land, and it starts rapidly thawing.

We desire something to warm the winter of our frozen souls. Upping our caffeine levels or embracing the cold can be temporary fixes. However, a permanent fix is needed. That fix is found only in the life and death of Jesus.

The Gospel writer John wrote in Jesus, there is new life; that life is the light of all humanity. No darkness can overcome it. Aslan's presence in Narnia starts spring, which brings Narnia out of its dark night and into the light of hope and renewal. The beauty of it all is that Aslan is Jesus inserted into the fictional land of Narnia.

When we experience winter, the season, or winter in the figurative sense, we do not have to feel like Mr. Tumnus. We do not have to live in the meaningless. We do not have to suffer the mundane or bleak. Jesus has already taken care of that. It is ok to embrace your feelings.

It is not ok to stay stuck there. The Dark Night of the Soul is just that, a dark night. The sun will rise again. Two thousand years ago, Jesus did rise again. That event brought on the hope of spring for the entire world. We never have to endure the dark night of the soul or a long winter without his presence.

Tyler Stricklan is student ministry director at LifePoint Church in Minden.