Here in good ol’ Indiana, where the whether is about as predictable as the temperament of two-year old, we’ve been going through one of the nastier heat waves I’ve ever experienced. The last couple days have been hovering around the high eighties, and there was a pretty intense thunderstorm the other night, but before that, it had been routinely pushing a hundred degrees for two or so weeks. My mom said that it hasn’t been this hot in the Hoosier state since the summer after I was born.
I currently live in a house with no air conditioning, a luxury that I had most of my life at home with my parents. I’ve tried to be tough and sweat it out, knowing that I am going to experience some pretty similar temperatures while out in the field, but when you walk out of nice air conditioned movie theatre after the midnight showing of Captain America and it’s still ninety five degrees, your heart sinks just a little and you wish for a different season.
I love fall. I love winter. I just generally like it when it is a little too cold. I figure, you can always put more clothing on, right? My default look is jeans, my favorite red hoodie, and my beat up brown pilot jacket. Layers, baby, layers. Sometimes when I visit friends without central heating during the winter, I’d sleep in my clothes – just pull the hood up over my head and curl up on a futon.
But with summer comes the heat and the sweating and the oily, greasy feeling you get when you wake up after having sweat the whole night in your sleep. You get that gross looking wet patch right above your belly button from the moisture soaking into your shirt. You have perpetually sweaty armpits. Your shins tickle as perspiration drips off your knees and gets caught in your leg hair.
I’m looking forward intensely to my next Indiana winter, which won’t happen for another sixteen months (Nepal in November might be a nice little substitute). But it has made me think about seasons, and how we have seasons in our life just like we have seasons in our weather. I am leaving the comfortable, familiar, hoodie-wearing winter of my life and stepping into a new season, one where the temperatures are scorching, the AC is non-existent, and the sweat stains of life stick uncomfortably to your chest and back.
It’s going to be hard. I’m not sure I realize what a crazy shock it’s going to be to get out in the field where everyone is speaking another language and eating without utensils and men are holding hands in the streets and all sorts of other unfamiliar customs. But seasons happen so that change can happen. Without summer, there wouldn’t be the warmth and sunshine for growth and maturation. And without winter, there wouldn’t be the time for hibernation and contemplation.
My hibernation period has reached its end, though, and my time of soaking up the sunshine has come. So here’s to seasons, and to the change they bring. God is going to work some crazy change in me, and its no coincidence that it will come with the changing seasons.
But come October 2012, you can bet your britches I’ll be the first one lying out in my front yard in sweatpants and a winter coat, waiting for the first snowfall.
