Day 19 - Lean on the wind

Immediately (after his Baptism) the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness. Mark 1:12

A few weeks ago, I was prowling round the back garden of my mother’s house, late at night, in darkness. This was nothing nefarious, you understand, but I had travelled up to find out if there had been any damage during the recent gales. Her neighbour said that a fence had come adrift, and there were reports of trees down, in my own hometown of Bedford.

I had lain awake the night before listening to the wind, and remembering. We all remember the ‘great storm’ of 1987, but my mind went back to the first time I had encountered gales when I was about 6 or 7 years old.

I remember being mystified and fascinated as my world turned upside down. Things I thought were fixed and immovable turned out to be completely unreliable. A neighbour’s greenhouse (I had only just come across these) blew across several gardens and landed upside down. Chimneys (remember those?) crashed through people’s roofs, causing destruction and injury.

On the other hand, the wind, which I had always thought of (if at all) as fickle and capricious, became sort of solid. I could lie back on it. I kept on trying this out. Of course, sometimes, I fell flat on my back; but very often, miraculously, it supported my weight. It was supremely comfortable, although I knew, from seeing chimneys and greenhouses, that it might at any moment pick me up, and drop me in a garden, or send me crashing through a roof.

These early experiences stayed with me all my life, and when I began to learn about God’s Spirit, much of the imagery made immediate and wonderful sense. ‘The wind blows where it will; no-one knows where it comes from or where it is going.’ (John 3:8) Indeed, the Spirit picked up Ezekiel and set him down in a valley, then set about rattling the bones together, and eventually filling them with the breath of life. (Ezekiel 37:1-10) Above all, there was the strange, mysterious wind of God, brooding, howling, over the deep, at the beginning of creation. (Genesis 1:2)

I learned to lean on the breath of God, trusting the heft of my life to the comfortable power of the Spirit. It’s still hard to do. And I learned to be in awe of the raw, untamed, unfathomable power of God.

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the Spirit ‘drove him out into the wilderness’ (Mark 1:12), where he encountered the terrible force of Satan. We know that Satan withdrew from that encounter for a time, but the Spirit, who rested upon him at his Baptism, became an integral part of his life and teaching.

I love this verse from a hymn by Cecily Taylor (1930-2021)

The bright wind is blowing, the bright wind of heaven,

The love that it kindles will never betray;

The fire that it fans is the warmth of our caring,

So lean on the wind — it will show us the way.

Janet Wootton