Turbulence

The wind is living up to its March-reputation today. It is whining and howling round the house, slamming doors and rattling windows and being a general pain. 

I don’t like the wind. 

It seems relentless as it blows. It can come in wild bursts or blow steady and strong. Don’t like either. It can break off branches, or pick up debris and fling it into your face or onto your head. For contact lens wearers, the dust is a menace. 

It can bring down telephone wires and disconnect communication channels. Someone in our area has been waiting for 6 weeks for the company to re-connect him after the last big blow.

It’s the unpredictability I hate, and the fact that I can see few redeeming features to its activity. Oh I know globally it does the whole weather thing, but here, in my garden, it does nothing but tear down and spoil things.

Every morning I pray that the Lord will enable me to handle all that comes my way, a surprise or expected, with grace and love, trusting that he has allowed it to touch me for some reason. Today I have felt blown about in more ways than just by the wind outside. 

Nothing horrendous, but lots of medium-sized niggles. Anxieties about family. Concern for health. That wearing back pain. Mistakes and criticisms. Work to be done which I had intended to do this morning, but my day has been hijacked and it will not get seen to today. 

Through my mind has just flashed a song which was popular in prayer groups when I was first born again. ‘Wind, wind, blow on me....set me free...the blessed Holy Spirit.’ How I loved that chorus. I loved singing, ‘wind, wind, blow on me’! Funny, when my feelings for the wind are not so positive.

The Holy Spirit is likened to the wind. Unpredictable. Blows where he will. Can’t be pinned down. 

Some Christians don’t really ‘do’ the Holy Spirit. His activity was for the early church, they may say. Now we have the Bible we don’t need his constant intervention and activity. To my mind, experience, and the way I read the Bible, they are turning away from an important aspect of God.

I wonder if this aversion to the Holy Spirit is like mine to the physical wind. Folk like to be in control. They don’t like something to happen in church (or anywhere else perhaps) which wasn’t allocated a time-slot for, which doesn’t seem quite normal, which has no explanation and may feel like it has no end. 

The thing about the Holy Spirit is he is God, an integral part of the trinity, and as such, he is love and nothing will happen which he hasn’t allowed. The wind of the Spirit may seem wild and out of control, but it isn’t. Out of our control, perhaps; not outside of God’s.

And neither is the wind blowing outside my door. So off I go to walk Dusty again...