Cold sinks through your skin into your bones. The wind slashes at your face like a knife.

You only have a few feet to go to the comfort and warmth of your home.

Not everyone has that warmth to look forward to.

For many, the comfort of home simply does not exist. They have nowhere to go.

Our station in life is a precarious thing.

A factory owner in Germany decides to decrease production and there’s a layoff. A cell in your body reproduces as a variant and you have cancer. A short lapse in judgment and you have a habit that haunts you for the rest of your life. Any of those things and more and you suddenly find yourself with nowhere to go.

Imagine that walk from your car to the comfort of your home is never-ending. For countless people, it is. Many, through no fault of their own.

So thank you to the people who provide an invaluable service to those who have nowhere to call home. To those who — with little funding, public support and sometimes in the face of criticism — save the lives of many who are forgotten by our society: Thank you.

You deserve it. You save lives, as surely as any physician or EMT — as surely as any hospital. You make a difference every single day to those who do not have a platform to thank you for it themselves.

The bitter cold that hit the region recently brings home how important warming centers and emergency shelters — and those who make them possible — are. To some, you’re the line between surviving another day or becoming a statistic.

— JP