A Devotion from George H Morrison

You made both summer and winter.
—Psalm 74:17

It is easy to believe that God made the summertime. Beauty is everywhere. The singing of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the amazing prodigality of life—these draw our hearts to the Giver of them all and make it easy to say, “You made summer.” With winter it is different. It is not so easy to see the love of God there. There is a great deal of suffering in winter, for both the animals and for people. It may therefore aid the faith of some who are tempted to doubt the love of God in winter if I suggest some of winter’s spiritual services.

One service of winter is to deepen our appreciation of the summer. We would be blind if summer were perpetual. We must feel the grip of winter, before we fully appreciate the summer. It is not the one who lives in bonnie Scotland who feels most deeply how beautiful Scotland is. It is the exile, yearning for the mountains and the glens. It is not the one with unbroken health who feels most deeply the value of health. That is realized when health is shattered.

Another service of winter is the larger demands it makes on the will. In summer it is comparatively easy to get out of bed at the appointed hour, for the earth is warm, the birds are singing, the light streams through open windows. But in winter, to fling the covers off and get up when it is dark and cold—that calls for a certain resolution, an instant demand on the will. Winter—when life is difficult and it takes some doing even to get up—is God’s tonic for his children’s will. Summer is languid; winter makes us resolute. We have to do things when we don’t feel like doing them.

Another service of winter is to intensify the thought of home. The thought of home is sweetest and richest and most beautiful in the dark and cold of winter. We talk in the same breath of hearth and home, and it is in winter that the hearth is glowing. Now think of everything we and the nation owe to home. Home is the basis of national morality.

[A final] service of winter is how it stirs our hearts to charity. It unseals the springs of pity. It moves us with compassion for the destitute, and to be moved so is very Christlike.

Such thoughts as these in icy days, when we are tempted to doubt the love of God, make it easier to say with David, “You made … winter.”