Wind

            It has been a few months since my last blog entry. It was a summer of funerals for me. While I don’t dwell on grief I must admit it took the wind out of my sails so to speak. Yet, it is wind that I want to focus on tonight.
            I have this association between wind and the Holy Spirit. It goes back a few years to when I tried to learn New Testament Greek. The Greek word for Spirit is “pneuma” which also translates to wind. It is so appropriate! We can’t see wind but we can see what the wind affects. As I write this Hurricane Matthew is slogging the southeastern coastline. It has been windy all week in Northern Illinois, I love the feel of air movement, I can tolerate heat if there is a breeze.
            In medical terms “pneuma” relates to the lungs, more wind. If you have ever had the “wind knocked out of you” the connection is obvious. We need the wind in our lungs to make ourselves heard as wind must pass through the vocal chords to create voice. We also need the Holy Spirit to give us the voice to testify. Without him we are unable to even say that Jesus is Lord.
            After my summer of funerals; I have been praying for a fresh breath of air from the Holy Spirit to lift me and enable me to feel something greater than the ordinary. It occurred to me this week while walking in the park and the tree tops were waving at me that my life (yours too) really is beyond ordinary. We look beyond the present to eternity, we anticipate something far greater than we can imagine. It is instilled in our souls, that place where Christ resides and the Holy Spirit dwells.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”



Posted by

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How are you?

Image
            When I wake, one of the first things I do is say, “Good morning God!” Some days are more enthusiastic than others. When I greet another human being, I usually follow that greeting with, “how are you?” This morning it occurred to me that I don’t ask God how he is. I have been contemplating this idea, how are you God? Obviously, given his attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience it is easy to follow the train of thought that he has everything in check. Despite that; I think of him in human terms and I can’t help but feel he is; not mad but disappointed (cringe). When he looks at creation, like a parent gazing on the wreckage of a kid’s toy room, wouldn’t there be disappointment?             As I contemplated that, my meandering mind led me to consider guilt. The guilt that leads to the disappointment of others. Every culture I have known lays claim to guilt; Lutheran guilt, Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt, Italian guilt and so on. Truth be told, we’re all guil
Read more

Out of the Mouth

Image
  Genesis 3:14 “God said to Moses, ‘I AM who I AM.’ This is what you are to say to the Israelites: “I Am has sent me to you.”             I feel the need to make a disclaimer statement up front as I can see what I will write in these next few sentences could be misconstrued. This writing is not claiming that man is God although I will say, that if you have claimed the Holy Spirit lives in you, that identifies that God is in you too.             How many times a day do you use the phrase “I am…”? Probably much more than you or I realize. This is how God identified Himself to Moses. “I AM who I AM” We often refer to God as the great I AM, which He is. Going back to how often we use the phrase, for myself those two words are often followed with denigrating words like; so stupid, so foolish, so dumb, so angry, so hurt, so fill in the blank. What if each time we thought about those two words and how we identify ourselves we replaced “I AM” with “God is” most of us (I make this assumptio
Read more

Masterpiece

Image
              As a young person, I was fond of painting, not great at it but reasonable. I set it aside when I fell in love and got married. In these days of isolation I needed to find some other ways to occupy myself other than baking and decided to get back to my paint brushes.   To get used to handling the brushes again I got myself a paint by number,             If you have never tried one of these let me give you a little insight. You receive a canvas with an image divided up into numbered areas and little pots of paint with corresponding numbers. Then you begin a sort of scavenger hunt trying to fill in all the spots of a particular number. Sounds simple enough, however some of these areas are so tiny they are easily overlooked. The tiny spots are important though, they give that little flourish that can draw the eye or round out an object.             Why do I tell you about this? As I dove into this project, a great life analogy was revealed to me and I do love a good word
Read more