Wind

The wind is going to blow, every time significant weather approaches Clay and I recite the same piece of stand up routine. It is Ron White (inappropriate I know but man I love stand up) He talks about a man who believed at 53 he was fit enough to withstand the winds of a Force 3 hurricane and planned to strap himself to a tree. The quoted piece is as follows, ” it is not THAT the wind is blowing but WHAT the wind is blowing. If you get hit with a volvo it doesn’t really matter how many sit ups you did that morning!” Wind is a common factor here in Oklahoma and we know exactly the forces it wields as we look around and see the damage and destruction it leaves in its wake.

I watched from my porch you few days ago as most of us do, show me an Okie who doesn’t step out on the porch and take a look around the minute they receive a weather alert. I watched the wind whip the tree’s in my yard so fiercely that I felt sure they were going to blow away, they looked as if they would just lift seamlessly from the ground at the force of something I could not physically see, I only see it’s work. We don’t see the wind, the actual wind, but we don’t doubt it’s power. We don’t see the wind, we see the things it moves it can change the landscape in only minutes. Laughingly I compare my children to this phenomenon because their destruction is similar in my home to what a tornado leaves behind, a disarray of things scattered as far as the eye can see. The thing is though I have witnessed an actual tornado’s damage in my home town in the last month, I have seen the change it created in the people, and the landscape, in only a moments time.

In praying for these people and to see the good, I saw communities come together, I saw love, sadness, loss, grief, and support and I thought maybe this was my take away from this life event when I sat down this morning to write this very thing, but something I heard on Sunday rang something new out of this for me. Doubt…we have doubts in God, doubts that He is good, doubts that He says He is, today I considered this….. I CAN NOT see the wind. I can feel it’s presence on my skin, I see the movement it creates in the world around me, the leaves on the tree’s wave in the breeze but yet it can blow with such force that it removes things from the landscape and changes the world around us with such a drastic action that it creates awe and wonder.

I saw beauty in that this morning, I CAN NOT see God but I don’t doubt his existence, because I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit on my face, I see the movements of God like a gentle breeze on my life and the lives of those around me, yet I have seen Him move with a force that drastically changed lives in a way only He can. We doubt. That is okay but there are times in our lives we stand in awe and amazement of the sights in front of us. I stood in awe of the debri but in that moment I can not deny the movement of the wind, and God said then DO NOT DOUBT ME.

SO when I started this blog post, I was going to write about how even though the wind was mighty and it pulled and pushed the tree’s in my yard have roots that far reach, holding fast to the ground but maybe that was a thought for another day. Keep those prayers coming for the Okies who have lost homes and loved ones to these forces of nature, God is working all things for good I see it in the people he’s moving around me.