Clear Winter Nights: A Journey into Truth, Doubt, and What Comes After

by Trevin K. Wax

“Chris, I want you to know that I’m proud of you.” Chris felt a tightness in his chest. “Proud? Of what? Me running off to drink away my problems? Breaking off an engagement to a perfect girl? Backing out of a church plant?” “Stop,” Gil said, interrupting. “I’m proud of the young man you are becoming. You’ve come face to face with some devastating sin and hypocrisy. You’re asking big questions and wrestling with important things, and there’s no shame in that. You want to own your own faith, not satisfied to go through the motions of a faith you’ve inherited. That’s admirable, if you ask me.” “Well, I appreciate that, Gramps. But I don’t feel very admirable.”

I was thinking about something you said yesterday. About all your life’s work being stored in that big box upstairs.” “Don’t take me too seriously,” Gil said. “The real work pastors like me do isn’t putting words on a page. It’s putting the Word in people’s hearts. The people who listened to those sermons—they’re my real life’s work.”

He tapped his cane on the floor in front of his seat. “I will be content. He is my reward. Not ministry or success or productivity.” Chris could tell from the way Gil said it that it was as much a resolution as it was a declaration. “Preaching to yourself there?” “Every day,” Gil said. “I’ve fought my entire life to find my worth and value in what Christ has done for me, not in what I do for Christ. There were times, I’m sorry to say, I mostly lost that fight.”

“Death doesn’t wait until love runs out,”

No one ever thinks about the gravity of saying “till death do us part” until death is on the doorstep, waiting to part the best of friends. For an hour after she died, Gil held her hand, wanting to hold on until the last of her warmth faded away.

The pastor’s message at the graveside was about tears and laughter and how the death of a saint brings both. Tears for our loss. Laughter for heaven’s gain. Tears for our present pain. Laughter for our future hope.

“Tears and laughter today,” he said. “Only laughter tomorrow.”

He bent his knees before a low bookcase and read the spines of adventure novels and mysteries, along with what Chris had never thought much about before—a Bible, devotional books, and other Christian reading. His father had been a devout youth, it seemed, whatever he had turned into later. Chris felt the anger that had seized him ever since he had learned of his father’s betrayal begin to lose its grip. He didn’t know if he could ever forgive his father or love him again as he once had. He didn’t know what he would do if his father called again. But the room reminded him that his father was a normal human being. Not a saint. Not a devil. Instead, someone who once seemed to have aspirations to follow Jesus, just as he had. Someone whose failings were all too obvious, just as his were.

Slipping into hypocrisy, as his father had done, would be easy, however strenuously he might resist. Giving up on faith altogether, or turning religion into an impersonal intellectual exercise, would be easy enough too. Really living his faith, as Gil had for six decades, would be a lot tougher. War, as Gil had called it. But after spending three days in this house, now it seemed like a war that might be worth fighting. Chris still had lots of unanswered questions, but he felt there might actually be answers to those questions, even if he hadn’t discovered them all yet. He didn’t see eye to eye with his granddad on everything, and probably never would. Even so, he wanted to be like Gil when he got to that age. Firm in his convictions, sophisticated in his arguments, yet without the rigidity that comes from a hardened heart.

On one side were Jesus and Ashley. On the other, an obscure vision of himself. Alone.

It doesn’t take a year to write a book; it takes a lifetime. The experiences of our past and the people we’ve known and loved shape our vision of the world and provide inspiration for writing.

G. K. Chesterton, who had the unusual gift of turning things upside down so we may at last see them right side up. Chesterton fans will see that I’ve adapted a number of his memorable aphorisms in this book.