A Mighty Rushing Wind

I live in a particularly windy area.

We’ve experienced more than one derecho living here; we catch a lot of significant thunderstorms and supercells.  This all brings wind: the sort that bends trees, sends trash cans sailing down the street, and can nudge your car on the interstate.

People who have been in this area know how to respond: we keep our trash cans indoors or in fenced areas when they’re not out for service, we stake any freestanding items down, and we keep our vehicles in the garage.  But every now and then someone new moves in who doesn’t do this, or who may not grasp the sort of wind we get, and they make A Mistake.

Case in point: a few years ago, during a vigorous storm, my husband and I stood at the glass doors that look out on our backyard.  We were listening for tornado sirens and otherwise enjoying the furor in the meantime.  But then my husband squinted at a dark shape rolling along against the horizon.  “What is that?”

It was a trampoline—a trampoline that our optimistic neighbor across the field had not thought to stake down.  Caught by the wind like a child’s toy, it now stood up on its side rolling at speed through other neighbor’s yards.  We watched in horror as it smashed through two fences, hit a car(that’s why we put them in the garage!), squashed several yards of flower arrangements, and then—picked up by a mighty gust—came at last to rest in the topmost branches of an exceedingly large oak.

I was thinking about this yesterday, Pentecost Sunday, when the Spirit descending is likened to the sound of a mighty rushing wind.  The Spirit is always associated, in Scripture, with movement and dynamism, with a sort of liveliness and—yes—unpredictability.  We cannot capture the Spirit; we cannot dominate it; we cannot control it.  We can only observe it, and sense it, and respond to it.

I should point out here that while wind can be destructive, the Spirit brings life and good fruit.  It is not a tornado, here to wreck lives and harm homes.  It is not even the gust that sent my neighbor’s trampoline spiraling through several fences.  But it is powerful. And while we acknowledge that it brings light and life, we can also acknowledge that the Spirit transforms.

And transformation can sometimes feel like destruction, I think, especially for those of who loathe change.

I am reminded of a local congregation in my community, which continued to dwindle and dwindle in size.  The shrinking was no one’s fault, really: changing demographics, other churches in the area, bad location.  But the consequences were inevitable: the church eventually grew so small it could not support a pastor, and had to settle for supply pastors sent in from surrounding areas. It could not maintain much in the way of ministries.  The congregants met and prayed about whether or not they should close the church.

Unexpected support came in the form of a local Indonesian congregation in search of a building.  After some negotiations, they eventually moved in alongside the dwindling group of initial congregants.  Some of those initial congregants left, feeling that the church was no longer “theirs”: they viewed this change as a sort of destruction.  But others remained, seeing transformation, and a thriving multicultural congregation has been the result.

But I wanted to stay here, God has been the cry of my heart for as long as I can remember.  I do not like moving, geographically speaking, and I don’t much like it spiritually speaking either.  Left to myself, I would prefer no wind at all: only calm sunny days, unfolding predictably each after the next, the line of the future clearly marked with no surprises.

That is not how the Spirit moves.

The Spirit sends people up to eunuchs in chariots and then sends them off rejoicing; it inspires voyages across the sea and to martyrdom and to various places all over the world; it asks us to go where we do not expect and equips us for what we can’t yet imagine.   My pastor pointed out in yesterday’s sermon that the believers all speaking in tongues must have looked, on the outside, like absolute chaos: imagine the scene!  And there is a rich and deep and holy order to what is going on, one known to God if not always to man.

One more word in closing:

There is, sometimes, a feeling I get when my life is changing significantly or about to change.  I don’t know how to describe it—sort of an unsettled, surprised revelation at what might be about to happen, a recognition that I sometimes have very little control over the shape of my own future.  And the thought I experience during those times is often something like, “Surely this isn’t where you want me to go?”

Over years, I have learned not to answer that question hastily. 

Sometimes it isn’t.  Sometimes God makes clear through His Word and His plans that a disconcerting change is not a path I ought to follow.  But just as often, I experience a sort of haunting resonance that what stands before me is a real possibility.  Because the Spirit’s habit is to lead us where we’re not certain, and where only God can do what God expects of us there.  The Spirit’s goal is always transformation. And so I frequently ask myself: could this [whatever it is] be something that is transforming? Is it a place or a change that requires I trust God to be in charge?

Am I willing to sit in uncertainty and allow God to move?  Am I willing to listen to that wind and have the world changed around me?  Will I follow?

Joy waits for those who answer in affirmative to the call of the Spirit.  But we must acknowledge that when the rushing wind arrives, the result may not always be what we expect.