While I'm not a huge fan of the chilly temperatures lately, I do so enjoy a good wind storm. There's just something so exciting about it: the way it causes the neighbor's porch chimes to furiously chatter along the gusty outbursts; the hypnotizing sway of the tall pine trees; the steady Whoooooosh! that can be heard and felt for miles around. And all along it just muffles the distant sounds of a busy city-the barking of some dogs, the exhale of school bus doors. I love the mystery that wafts through with the breeze. At any moment, those bursts of air might send the clouds packing and make room for a glorious sunshiney sky. Or it could usher in a terrible black storm that takes down power lines and has everyone humming about global warming or something like that. It's eery. It's ominous. It's thrilling.
Windy days just stir up a sleeping passion in me for some reason.
As I looked out and surveyed the view from my front yard this morning, stealing some precious contemplative time while the kids worked on crafts inside, I started thinking that this mysterious, hardly measurable phenomenon is a lot like the way God brings about new things in my life. It always, always, always gives way to a brighter future, but the getting there is so often tumultuous that I get lost in the whooshing. I feel like a pathetic leaf being churned around along an invisible tide. I usually end up forgetting to stop and enjoy all that mystery and contemplating when the storm is in my soul.
The best part of the storm, though, is the end. The tragically glorious finale: realizing that in spite of the scattered debris and damage to be repaired, or even just a dishoveled hairdo that I may have sustained in the blasts-knowing that I was meant to survive something powerful, because I'm still standing there to marvel.
I'm praying that in the very near future, when the breeze picks up and I'm preoccupied with the mundane, that I won't so much be knocked off my feet or caught up in a dread of the unknown end, but that I would just be.
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18
