When Your Heart Has Frozen Over: Learning to Thaw

I have to be honest with you about something.

I've been a pastor long enough to know that sometimes the most dangerous thing religion does isn't scandalize people — it numbs them. Somewhere between the grief of living in a world that keeps disappointing us and the exhaustion of showing up week after week trying to believe it all still matters, a lot of us quietly go cold. Not cold in any dramatic way. We don't storm out. We don't stop believing. We just... stop feeling. And we get very, very good at calling that spiritual maturity.

This season, I've been sitting with a different word for it: frozen. As we move through our sermon series Surviving Saturday — a journey through the raw, disorienting book of Jeremiah — I've become increasingly convinced that our work isn't just about survival. Survival is necessary. But we were made for more than keeping our heads above water. We were made for thaw.

The Geography of Disaster

Most of the book of Jeremiah was written by people who had lost everything. Their city was rubble. Their temple — the place they believed God literally lived — was gone. Families were split apart. Entire generations were carried off to Babylon in chains.

What strikes me most, reading it carefully, is not how dramatic their language gets — though it does get dramatic — but how disoriented they seem. It's not until chapter 20 that anyone even names Babylon as the threat. It's not until chapter 39 that anyone gives a clear account of what actually happened. They could barely look at the catastrophe straight on. They could only see it out of the corner of their eyes.

That is what trauma does. Hebrew Bible scholar Kathleen O'Connor describes it this way: disasters "turn life upside down and shake the foundations of the world apart in unimaginable and unspeakable ways. They destroy daily existence and shatter its meanings. They leave people stunned, isolated, and hopeless."

And here's the part I want to sit with: when the devastation is great enough, people go numb. Not as a character flaw. As a survival mechanism. When feelings are so riotous they short-circuit your capacity to feel at all, numbness becomes a mercy. The problem, as O'Connor also notes, is that when you can't feel, grief and anger become unreachable. And if you cannot grieve your losses — if you cannot feel legitimate rage at the systems and people who have wounded you — then you cannot begin to heal. You can't see a future that genuinely feels possible. You can't imagine that joy might still have your name in it.

I want to be careful here. Most of us are not facing anything like what the Israelite community faced. I think about the people of Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are places where this sermon could be preached and every word would land like a stone on a bruise. For most of us in the room, the catastrophes we've survived are quieter — but quieter doesn't mean small. And the numbness they produce is just as real.

The Surprise in the Middle

Here's what I love about the book of Jeremiah: right in the very middle of all that darkness, there is a collection of passages scholars call The Little Book of Comfort — chapters 30 through 33. And it comes like a surprise. You've been reading grief and warning and lament and anger and more grief — and then suddenly, this:

"The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah... I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people." — Jeremiah 31:31–33

The promise that follows reads almost like a fever dream after everything that came before it. Tambourines. Dancing. Vineyards. Laughter. The sound of merrymakers. God promising not just a reversal of fortune, not just a return home, but abundance overflowing. Joy that spills over. Belonging that you can feel.

It is not a coincidence that this passage sits at the center of the book. Whoever arranged this text knew what they were doing. They wanted us to understand that even when disaster has the first word and grief fills the majority of the pages, hope is not an afterthought. Hope is the hinge.

"God makes the possibility of abundant joy thinkable again. God makes clear that numbness, pain, and loss will not be the last word."

And the new covenant — this renewed relationship God offers — has continuity with everything that came before. God isn't starting over. God is saying: you have not been disqualified by what has happened to you. You are still my people. I am still your God. Come back.

Hakuna Matata Is a Lie

Stay with me here, because I want to talk about The Lion King. When I first turned this idea of thawing over in my mind, I kept coming back to the animation in that 1994 Disney film — the way it opens in such vivid, saturated color and then slowly drains to grey as Simba's world falls apart. Simba is a king's son, heir to the Pride Lands, being carefully formed by a loving father.

And then catastrophe strikes. His father is killed — murdered, actually — and his uncle Scar whispers the cruelest possible lie into the ear of a grieving child: This is your fault. Run away. Never come back.And Simba does. Because sometimes a convincing enough lie, told at the right moment of vulnerability, can reshape an entire life. He eventually finds a kind of peace with Timon and Pumbaa — outcasts and misfits who've developed their own philosophy to cope with a world that rejected them: Hakuna Matata. No worries. Turn your back on the world before it can turn its back on you. Simba, a carnivore born to rule, learns to survive on bugs. Because he believes he cannot have more. Because he has forgotten who he is.

I think this is a more familiar story than most of us want to admit. Lent is an opportune time to ask ourselves: What lies have I been living inside? What guilt or shame sent me running? What self-protective strategies have I built that once kept me safe but are now just keeping me stuck? What kind of spiritual diet have I been surviving on because I've stopped believing I deserve more? We are children of a covenant-keeping God, called — as Dallas Willard puts it — to "a direct and fully conscious relationship with God as priests, sharing responsibility as kings in the exercise of this authority." We are called to steward everything the light touches. And most of us are living like we don't believe that. Like the exile has convinced us we were never citizens to begin with.

The Pond, the Reflection, and the Voice

What calls Simba home is not a self-help program. It's not a motivational speech. It's a moment by the water where he sees his own face — and hears his father's voice. Simba. You have forgotten who you are, and so you have forgotten me. You are more than what you have become. Remember who you are. That's the new covenant in a Disney movie.

Because what Jeremiah 31 is really offering isn't a transaction — a new set of rules to follow to get back in good standing. It's an invitation to intimacy. The language scholars use for the Hebrew here is the language of knowing in the deepest possible sense — sexual, embodied, acquainted with both the worst of the world and the worst of the self, and choosing not to hold back anyway. God is saying: I want you to know me the way you know someone you've loved for years, not the way you know a doctrine.

And then — this is the part that gets me — the passage ends with geography. Specific streets. Specific hills. The valley of the dead bodies. All those destroyed places, all those fields and ruins, encompassed by the love of God and declared sacred.

Not erased. Not sanitized. Sacred.

The wounds don't disappear in God's restoration. They get included. They get enlarged into something the love of God can inhabit. The vision is not a world without scars but a world where the scars are no longer the last word — where you cannot be uprooted or overthrown, not because nothing hard will ever happen again, but because you know with your whole body that God's desire for intimacy surpasses any trauma that could ever displace you.

The Invitation: Write It Down

At the very beginning of the Little Book of Comfort, before the dancing and the tambourines and the new covenant, God says something interesting to Jeremiah. "Write in a book all the words that I have spoken to you."

That's where I want to leave you.

As we move deeper into Lent — this season of honest accounting, of releasing the false selves we've built for self-protection, of doing the hard work of allowing our hearts of stone to become hearts of flesh — I want to give you a practice that is both ancient and deceptively simple: Write it down.

Write past the numbness. Write past the exhaustion. Write past the cynicism or the grief or the particular closet you've been standing inside for longer than you meant to. Write the vision of joy that you believe — even faintly, even skeptically — that God might be calling you toward.

You might write: I may not know how to pray in public yet. I may not know how to read scripture without flinching yet. I may not know how to trust a community again yet. I may not know how to forgive yet. But God's intent for me is that I will.

That is a yet-kind-of-faith. And it is enough to start with.

Because the covenant is forever. God has staked the whole thing on the fixed order of the sun and moon. The heavens cannot be measured. The foundations of the earth cannot be fully explored. Which means the invitation never expires. Which means the color can return. Which means the thaw is always possible. *Remember who you are.

May the One who made us to be kings and priests turn our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. May God restore and make sacred all the wounded places in our lives, that we might be suitable stewards of everything the light touches. Amen.