Never jump off a bridge to rescue a hat, someone wise told me once. Not even, I suppose, the most recent addition to my winter wardrobe arsenal. Brown mock-suede with a deep fur trim, I wear it only when winter slaps my face, mocks the memory of summer and sucks every thought but one through the top of my head: Are you nuts? GO BACK INSIDE!”
The driveway needed digging out the other day, one of those face-slapping Arctic weather days when the thermometer plunged to thirty-six degrees below zero. I dressed in layers like an onion: Tights. Long socks on top of tights. Jeans on top of long socks. Shirt. Extra shirt. Sweater on top of extra shirt. Two layers of fleece fashioned into a black triangle that covers the lower half of my face and fastens behind my head. Calf-length navy coat with two layers, zippers, buttons and hood. Before lifting the hood, I added the best layer of all: the hat.
My fashionable relatives (who live in warmer climes) would disown me on the spot. (Those who still admit to owning me in the first place may reconsider.) But some things don’t matter in extreme cold.
In my Facebook profile picture, I’m wearing the hat. “You look like a Russian,” many of my friends commented. I told them I come honestly by that look. Before they emigrated to Canada in the early 1900s, my German grandparents lived in Ukraine, then still part of the Russian Empire. I have photos of them taken on their Saskatchewan homestead in winter, wearing hats similar to mine. Standing beside my shovel in my suburban driveway, I look a lot like them.
The hat sedates that inner voice that shrieks retreat. I like things that help me ignore cowardly thoughts. Boldness doesn’t come naturally to this prairie chicken. I have to practice it.
In the chill of today’s anti-God social climate and “anything goes” spiritual climate, it also takes a layered approach to keep one’s spirit warm. But every person of bold faith I know applies them – a passion for truth, the study of scripture, prayer, solid teaching and a close community of fellow believers.
Most important of all is the hat. Not a fur cap like mine, or any physical hat, but a prayerfully kept pattern of thinking that insulates against fierce winds that run contrary to biblical faith.
The Apostle Paul talks about that in his letter to the Philippian church, when he advised believers, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”
The hat isn’t always an easy or comfortable fit. Christ-followers bold enough to wear it are rarely popular and, like Jesus, scorned by the more “fashionable” religious set. Nevertheless, developing a mindset that practices thinking and acting like Christ, that serves others instead of itself – that hat is worth jumping off a bridge to rescue. Because putting it on and keeping it on changes the world.
