The cold has a way of drawing us inward, both to the warmth of our homes and to the quieter chambers of reflection, and it was in that spirit that the Lycoming County commissioners gathered on January 29 for their weekly meeting at the courthouse in Williamsport.

The winter has been unrelenting this year, the kind of cold that makes your lungs catch when you step outside, the kind that forces you to reconsider even short trips to the mailbox. With the sun setting before most people leave work, the season carries a particular heaviness. The darkness arrives so early now that it feels as though night has claimed more than its fair share of the day. These are the weeks when people spend most of their time indoors, watching the thermometer and waiting for relief. The commissioners acknowledged this reality, encouraging residents to keep each other’s spirits up during these cold and dark times.

There was cause for celebration at the meeting. For the first time in years, the commissioners presented a balanced budget, a milestone that represents countless hours of work by the board and county staff. The achievement reflects more than numbers on a ledger. It demonstrates a commitment to fiscal responsibility and long-term planning for Pennsylvania’s largest county by land area, a county whose vast wilderness and rural character present unique budgeting challenges. In a time when many municipalities struggle with fiscal pressures, Lycoming County has charted a course toward stability.

The meeting also took time for remembrance. January 28 marked the anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, when seven space pioneers were lost 73 seconds after liftoff. Their names deserve to be remembered: Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. They represented the best of what humans can aspire to, a willingness to venture into the unknown for the advancement of all humanity.

And just days ahead, on February 3, comes another somber anniversary. In 1943, the USAT Dorchester, a transport ship carrying troops across the frigid North Atlantic, was torpedoed by a Nazi submarine. The boat sank in just 27 minutes. 674 heroes went down with her in waters so cold that survival was measured in minutes, not hours.

Four men are particularly remembered from that night. Chaplains George Fox, Alexander Goode, Clark Poling, and John Washington, men of different faiths, Methodist, Jewish, Dutch Reformed, and Catholic, gave away their life jackets to soldiers and linked arms on the sinking deck, praying together as the waves rose. They were last seen that way, united in their final moments, their distinct beliefs dissolved into a single act of love. In the chaos and terror of a ship going down in the black Atlantic, these four men found something greater than self-preservation.

The commissioners emphasized that these four chaplains of different faiths found a way to love and work together at a moment’s notice, and urged that we should have the same urgency to care about each other each day. It was a powerful reminder, offered in the cold depths of winter, that community is not a fair-weather proposition.

The balanced budget, the remembrance of those lost to space and sea, the acknowledgment of the season’s difficulty, all of it wove together into something larger than the mechanics of county government. It was a call to remember that we are bound together, especially when the darkness comes early, and the cold drives us inside.

The commissioners meet every Thursday at 10 am, conducting the steady work of governing a county that stretches across 1,244 square miles of Pennsylvania wilderness. Most weeks, the agenda items are routine: budget amendments, contract approvals, personnel matters. But every so often, there are moments like this one, when the business of government pauses to acknowledge the deeper currents that connect us all. The cold will break eventually. The sun will set a little later each day as February gives way to March. But the lessons from this meeting, about responsibility, remembrance, and community, remain.

As former Penn State wrestler and coach Rich Lorenzo once said, “You have to be willing to suffer to be successful.”