A Different Kind of Cozy

December 17, 2024

Beloved:
          Good morning (afternoon?) on this beautiful day in southern Indiana.  By beautiful I mean sunny and 37 degrees.  The high temperature will be 52 and then begin to drop and stay below freezing for at least a week.  While I love winter for  the coziness of flannel pajamas and hot tea, that’s all different since I’ve been volunteering with B-SWERS, the Bloomington Severe Weather Emergency Shelter.  B-SWERS is a pop-up shelter, only open when the weather is dangerously cold or wet, run entirely by volunteers with hardly two dimes to rub together.  Every night it operates is as much a miracle as the oil in the widow’s jar (2 Kings 4:1-7).  We hardly know what we are doing and we have no money to do it - and yet somehow it gets done.
          But it has ruined winter’s coziness for me.  Taking a hot shower and putting on clean pajamas to lay down in a real bed with my own clean sheets and blankets is a heartbreaking luxury some of our neighbors have given up remembering.  Saturday I ran to the Kroger down the street for two things I needed to make my snack mix for the church cookie exchange.  The store was so, so full of customers buying their week’s worth of groceries, pushing them to their cars to take to their kitchens to unload and put away, like you and I have a thousand times ourselves.  But our B-SWERS guests aren’t at the grocery store buying cartloads of food.  They are always hungry when they arrive, glad for whatever little snacks we have to give them, applesauce pouches and peanut butter crackers which they eat sitting on their floor mats.  Not unlike preschoolers, now that I think about it, only with shaggy beards and tattoos.
          Insofar as winter’s old coziness is ruined, I have to say I like this better, hosting people for whom there’s no room anywhere else.  Somehow it feels truer to the season we claim to be celebrating.  Did people scooch closer together to make room for the holy couple, then rearrange again when Mary’s labor started, allowing her what privacy they could?  Did they go through their packs to share what little they had with someone who needed it more?
          This pop-up shelter is cozy in its own way.  The host churches turn the heat up and lend their coffee pots for decaf and hot water.  We go through no less than fifty packets of hot chocolate a night.  I see shelter guests sharing what they have every night I’m there:  cigarettes and socks.  They are the most exhausted people I have ever known, and yet sleep does not always come easy, so they sit and visit quietly, or listen to their music.  I feel humbled to be among them, grateful to be received and included in their holy presence.
          I pray the season’s meaning is near to you as well.
​

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Sweet & Spicy Snack Mix

• 4 cups Cinnamon Chex cereal
• 4 cups Cheez-it crackers
• 2 cups mini pretzel twists
• 1 cup mixed nuts
• ½ cup butter
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Mix cereal, crackers, pretzels and nuts in a large bowl.
Melt butter and stir in brown sugar and cayenne pepper.
Pour butter mixture over mix and gently toss until everything is fully coated.
Divide mix evenly on the baking sheets, spreading into a flat layer.
Bake for 15 minutes, one sheet at a time.
Allow to cool before breaking apart into an airtight container.

Note:  I made several batches, adding more cayenne pepper each time to make heat taste a little stronger, without ruining it.  Even ⅓ tsp was not too much.