I’m here at Pilgrim Center for a conference staff retreat. As usual, Bob Mutton and I stay up long past everyone else, talking about work, life, everything. I go to the car just before 1am to pick up pre-sleep reading material, and the January night air is perfectly cool, though not cold, and clear. Without a coat, I feel a bit of chill, but night's clarity and silence compensate.

Suddenly the outside lights go out and I realize they are on timers and have reached their limit. I've not yet reached mine.

Suddenly, the path to the lake is too dark to travel in winter's icy uncertainty, so I return to Oakmound Lodge and its safe deck overlooking Green Lake. For a few minutes I stand coatless on the deck, looking at lights across the ice, wondering which are the Heidel House, where we stayed last year and the year before. I think of writer SJ Rozan and her winter blog entries, describing the ice of New York's rivers and the natural landscape of the city, and I glory in my landscape, so dearly familiar and so new as I look at it in winter's early morning light. I wonder if summer's lushness would allow me to see the lake so well as I can see it through winter's nudity. I feel the cool air and relish sensation. I'm such a winter person.

And most of all, despite the messes I've been party to this week, the personal and church conflicts with family and friends, in tonight's evening prayers and in the absolute stillness of this January night on the lake, I find peace.