This just in . . . most of our NC Baptist churches have been affected by winter weather the past couple of weeks in one way or another.

Ever notice that we are never prepared for bad weather? Oh, we think we are. We have been conditioned to make a bee line to the grocery store and get milk, eggs, and bread. I don’t think any of us ACTUALLY check to see if we have those things, and/or if we need anything else, but we sure go for those three things every time the forecast is for winter weather.

The recent wave of ice, snow, and winter mix that hit the area where I live found my wife and me using every form of electronic communication available to us to make sure we got ready ahead of time. As the meteorologists predicted, we prepared. I e-mailed her a grocery list. She sent me a text message from the store to check our supply of TP. (We were good!) We both used various weather sites on the Internet to keep up to date on when it was going to start falling and how much was going to accumulate. We checked and rechecked everything we just knew we would need.

And with all of that, we left two MAJORLY important things (and one minor one) out of our preparation plans. We forgot to go get the snow shovel out of our storage shed, and we didn’t get any of that “salt mix” to spread on our driveway. And while it didn’t seem like as big a deal, both of us had intended to pick up a sled for the kids at some point and that too had fallen by the wayside.

Our driveway can only be described as steep. I don’t know anything about grading, but it is simply really steep. So the shovel and the melt mix was a necessity, and the sled would have been fun on the surrounding hills which are similarly steep. But we never got around to any of them. How could we possibly forget the snow shovel, salt, and sled?

Enter my next door neighbor, homemade play dough, and two “catch all pans”. My next door neighbor lived in Maine for 20 plus years and while he was fully prepared for wintry weather, he is, in his own words “too old to mess with using the shovel.” So I traded my being able for his having one available and shoveled both our driveways. Once I got the driveway cleared I was lamenting about not having something to put down to ensure that the melting snow wouldn’t run back across the driveway and make an equally nasty mess by freezing. While she was looking for something for the kids to do, my wife stumbled upon her bag of supplies with which she makes “homemade play dough” for her preschool classes. In the bag were four big cans of salt. Not the good rock kind, and certainly not with the other components (what ever those are) of the premade mix, but it did keep the run off from re-freezing. Just below the bag of supplies she found two “catch all pans.” The light-weight plastic with smooth bottoms and even a lip which works as a handle pans we picked up at Lowe’s a couple weeks ago to use in a gardening project we’d hoped to have done by now.  We had one of those “are you thinking what I am thinking” moments just before we yelled to the kids to get their sledding clothes on. I pushed the kids down the hill and (eventually) carried them back up so many times I lost count. I laughed so hard I hurt, and so did the kids. My wife got next year’s Christmas card picture from one failed push that landed me on my belly and the kids stuck not making it down the hill yet. We had a ball.

To call five hours on a Sunday afternoon devotional is not exactly abnormal. Sunday’s are, after all, the day when most of us find time to be devotional, assuming we ever do. But this wasn’t church. And it wasn’t even the poignant time that “snow days” often give us forcing us to slow down. No this was different, but none the less spiritual for me. This was the living out of helping ones neighbor, literally. This was hard work, forgetfulness, and bored kids coming together to remind me how resourceful my God is. He doesn’t need my help at all. And yet He allows me to be part of His creative and innovative work each and every day . . . even snow days!