Bears do seem to have it all worked out. Iguanas too, though this year some were caught off guard - during a recent cold snap in Florida, they were falling from the trees as their bodies warped into hibernation when they became cold.

I'm feeling in much the same mood. Weather people are telling us that North Carolina is in the midst of the coldest winter since the seventies. I wonder if the cold weather should be an invitation for us, like the iguanas, to fall from our busy schedules into a posture of hibernation.

On Epiphany Sunday, the attendance at my church in Cedar Grove, N.C., was low, as the parking lot had a dusting of snow. Those who came had replaced their dress shoes for boots, their skirts for pants. There was a spirit of excitement. As we gathered in the warm sanctuary, we felt blessed, knowing that warmth in cold weather is a gift.

I bundled up that afternoon and walked to Anathoth Community Garden, about two miles from the parsonage. The earth, too, had been put to bed. Winter rye bent over to touch the earth as ice lay upon each stalk. The chickens ran out from their coop and called for food. The ground crunched under my feet, and the blueberry bushes were only bare sticks reaching upward. The beehives were quiet, and the strawberry plants rested under a blanket of straw.

During the quiet of the winter, the deep roots of the rye do their work to aerate the earth; the roots of the strawberries send forth shoots and multiply. What if the cold weather is an invitation for us to make space for God's Spirit to gestate new life in us as well? For us to send roots down, deep into the depths of the hard soil of our souls; for us to send forth shoots that will bear sweet fruit come spring?

I walked the two miles back home, listened to my messages, then curled under Polly Pope's hand-stitched quilt and pulled out my knitting. Maybe this sweater will be finished in time for next winter's invitation to hibernate.