The forecast for snow came midweek, as Rache and I were vacationing with old friends, enjoying the sweet warmth of the Caribbean in January. Nothing could have seemed further from the sultry breezes kissing my cabin veranda on the Koningsdam than snow, but there it was.
Our algorithmic prognosticators suggested, as they often do, wildly catastrophic potential snowfalls. Look at the European model! Two feet! Maybe three feet! An inch of ice! All of that, coupled with high temperatures far below freezing, and things looked "significant." For the heart of the American South, things looked truly worse, far worse, as our Mid-Atlantic snow and sleet would come down mostly as freezing rain. Then the whole mess would just stick around for days and days.
When was it arriving? Saturday night. When was it peaking? Sunday morning into Sunday afternoon. Of course.
What a lovely time not to have access to cell service, I sighed.
But shipboard wifi is a thing, now, so e-mails were sent back and forth, and after waiting to ensure that the forecast wasn't just a GPT hallucination, the decision was made to cancel services for the day. Much of the concern among the elders was about my thirty seven mile journey to the church, which would take me down miles and miles of snow-covered back roads.
To be entirely honest, that drive would be a hoot. The big beefy full-sized four-wheel drive Tahoe I rented when we arrived at Dulles would eat that up with a spoon. I, in return, was more concerned about my folks. I want no-one to slip and fall, or to strain a back. I want no-one to get stuck, or to go sliding off the road into a ditch, as happened to a music director of ours years ago on a snowy Sunday morning. Stay home. Take care.
The question, then, became whether or not to attempt something virtually. We've got a great streaming setup at the church, of course, with gimballed cameras and church folk who have technical skills beyond my meager abilities. But again, folks would need to get to the sanctuary to do that, leaving me with the option of doing an early pandemic talking-head-style sermon from my laptop, which would then be booped up onto our YouTube.
But the Mac I once used to design those services is long dead, and given my dying ancient Chromebook, this option gives me a bit of service-failure PTSD.
So instead, the snow day will be a Sabbath, and the Sabbath will be a snow day.
Snow days were all Sabbaths, after all, back before the internet brought the blighted expectation that nothing should ever prevent us from working, that we should set our days into a drab endless sameness.
If there was no school, there was no school. If getting to work was impossible or unwise, you just didn't work. You shoveled out, which is exercise. You helped your neighbors, and checked in on folks who might not be able to get out. You got together with friends and went sledding. If you had a 4x4 or were competent in the snow, you went out and ran errands for folks, stopping to help every stuck soul you met. And after all of that, you got a fire going in the hearth, and got cozy.
And everything worked out fine. The world kept turning.
As Ecclesiastes teaches, there are days that should be marked by difference. We should approach life in ways appropriate to the season.
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