One of the things that I’ve often thought about living up here in the North country is the wind. There are some years when the wind seems to never stop. In boxes the compass. Truckers joke that when they’re going south the wind is coming from the south into their faces, and when they turn around and come home it’s coming from the north so it’s in their face again. It’s sometimes blows so hard that empty trailers being hauled blow over into the oncoming lanes of traffic. Wind of course is a force of nature, it is that by definition, but that has a different connotation up here. It is not just a force of nature and weather, sometimes it almost seems to be an entity.
The last week has been particularly windy and it is had some interesting results. One day the air was so full of seeds that it almost seemed as if it were snowing. Whatever the seeds are, cat tail, cottonwood, thistle, it has been quite a sight.
One farmer in church told me that one of his black fields that he and cultivated was so covered with seeds that it looked as if manna had fallen. The field looked he said, “just the way the Bible describes manna, like a fine hoarfrost covering the ground”. Exodus 16. I have a screened in porch that has so many seeds on it you cannot see out three of the sides..
In Jesus day and his culture the weather was as important as it is today in our farm communities. We spend a lot of time observing the weather, and commenting on it. Jesus said the wind blows where it wants to and we don’t know where it comes or where it goes. This Sunday morning it was quiet but as I made my rounds to the different churches it started to pick up again. Today it’s from the southwest. I watched a murder of crows trying to maneuver over some stash of food they found and it looks like hard going. So the seeds and difficulty of movement for trucks and birds are the result of wind but not the wind itself. We can’t see the wind. We see the effects of the wind.
The Bible uses the word “pneuma” for wind, breath, and spirit. We cannot see the Spirit of God. We see effects.
C. H. Spurgeon once said, “The great King, immortal, invisible, the Divine person, called the Holy Spirit: it is He that stimulates the soul, or else it would lie dead forever; it is He that makes it tender, or else it would never feel; it is He that
imparts power to the Word preached, or else it could never reach further than the ear; it is He who breaks the heart, it is He who makes it whole; He, from first to last, is the great worker of Salvation in us, just as Jesus Christ was the author of Salvation for us.”
