COTTAGE LESSONS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

The idea was ridiculous, but we inquired about the price. The price was ridiculous, but we bought the cottage anyway. It was priceless.

Waggs and I would drive over to the cottage on Friday afternoon. Helen would come after school. We would eat frozen burritos and read until we fell asleep. The next morning Waggs would get us up to wander the shore looking for fish-heads. On Saturday afternoon we would reluctantly drive back to the land of work. But that weekly overnight in the cottage made it possible for us to stay alive by being ourselves.

Then I took a sabbatical. Helen continued to teach. The cottage wasn’t big enough to live in, so we moved to a town ten miles away, so that I would not be in the way of the new pastor. The cottage became a burden. Rather than a retreat, it was just a place where we had to go to mow the lawn and do other maintenance, just like our house. We didn’t need a cottage because we had nothing to get away from.

Old age is like a cottage. It can be a hideaway, where you get to be yourself at last, or a burden because it’s just more of the same old you. I’ve paid a lot for this present priceless opportunity. I intend to make the most of it.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

My youthful ambition was to be a journalist, and write a column for a newspaper. So I think of this blog as an online column. I started it several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, ”Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!” [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] We no longer live in “the place of winter.” The grandchildren grew up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I continue to work at understanding what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.