Where the North Wind Blows

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Sitting across the coffee shop table from her, I cannot see the Spirit of God in her—just as I cannot see the wind that’s whipping up off the cold Missouri river this morning. I do not know where these January gales come from, or where they’ll lie down tonight. They’re sharp, cutting right through my NorthFace, so I can only guess they’re from the North.

Maybe the wind on Front Street this morning began as high- and low-pressure dancing somewhere up in the Canadian Rockies. Maybe it swept across the plains of Saskatchewan at dawn this morning, over tracks of frozen snow and acres of sleeping crops. This wind could have blown down the tongue of Hudson Bay, then gathered enough ferocity to spider out across the Great Lakes. It might have whisked up a snowstorm in Minnesota, where the rivers are frozen silent, before it sliced through a wide-open Iowa. Maybe it soared down the Nishnabotna River to where it meets the Missouri, and from there, took its course southeast to find us on Front Street this morning.

Even then, this river town is just a byway, and the wind will blow on to the sea.

Today, I have to brace up against it, shoulders down, hood over my eyes, and still, I am no match for the Great North Wind from the very nostrils of the Everlasting God.

“He rode on a cherub and flew;
He came swiftly on the wings of the wind…
Then the channels of the sea were seen,
and the foundations of the world were laid bare
at your rebuke, O LORD,
at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.”
~ Psalm 18:10, 15

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I cannot see where this wind comes from, but I can see where it has been. Trees bent, grasses matted, barns with gaps in the boards like missing teeth. After Tuesday’s windstorm, I drove to town and all the road signs were plastered white with blown snow.

The wind had been there.

“So it is with the Spirit,” Jesus told Nicodemus, who was having trouble believing something as forcible as Yahweh God could be inside a person. After all, he couldn’t see anything. “How can these things be?” he asked. In other words, “Where does this Great Wind come from?”

“The wind blows where it wishes,” Jesus said, “and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with the Spirit” (John 3:8).

Of the wind, D.A. Carson writes:

“We hear its sound, watch the swaying grasses, see the clouds scudding by, hide in fear before the worst storms. So it is with the Spirit. We can neither control him nor understand him, but that does not mean we cannot witness his effects. Where the Spirit works, his effects are undeniable and unmistakable.”[i]

David heard the army of the Lord like a stirring in the balsam trees above him (2 Sam. 5:24). Ezekiel heard a rattling wind before it surged into a valley of skeletons and raised them into an army (Ezek. 37:10). Where the Wind of the Spirit blows, God’s people live to conquer death.   

I might not know where this Wind comes from, just as I can’t see the wind on the river this morning. But I can see where it has been.

I know it blew through our church doors and stirred in the sanctuary when we prayed over our community on Wednesday night. It rose from the Children’s Center downstairs, where they ran sewing machines to make scarves for the elderly. It didn’t stop there, but whisked out into the parking lot and swept across the field to the clustered apartments, where the good news of the gospel continues to rattle doorknobs and knockers.

And today, I can see that the Spirit has been in her, across the table from me. He has been stirring, moving, blasting as fierce as the North Wind with holy conviction and grace.

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[i] Carson, D.A. The Gospel According to John. (APOLLOS: Leicester, England, 1991), 197