This is How Love Wins

The place where shame and grace collide...how amazing.

I love that.

Gone With the Wind

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”

Bob Dylan

I watched the sky move last night, after the rain stopped the clouds lifted and drifted off; the stars poked out and laid out all around them was the blackness of the space beyond…amazing night.

Amazing how things can change so quickly, I was just hunkering down for a good winter storm and out come the stars!

I watched the sky…clouds skiffing by, teasing the stars masquerading as will-o-wisps, dancing past, rearranging themselves into living creatures, angels, animals, lions, bears; silent, still, but on the move.  Soundless roars, paws lifted, morphing into waves, waves of ocean spray rolling over each other like the bottom of Niagra Falls, rushing, blowing in the wind, filling in the black empty spaces that are now gone with the wind.

Amazing how things can change so quickly, like the blink of an eye really, here today, gone tomorrow…life changes too, just like that…in the blink of an eye.

I watched ‘Gone with the Wind’ this past week, there had been some talk in our Bible study about it, in fact a bit of it was used by the author of the study we are in the midst of and I wanted to see what the reference was about, maybe settle a bit of the controversy that had crept up around it.  I watched the whole four hours, well, broken between two evenings, I loved it; I could hardly wait for the next evening when I could continue the saga.   What I found was a story of a young woman whose life is in constant change and how she makes her way through the challenges, how sometimes she is the blame for the changes and how sometimes she has no control at all, her world is caught up in winds of change…changing in a way that things will never be the same again…her world, gone with the wind.

It is this way for us too, some changes we have no control over, yet we need to make responses while living in the midst of it; the wind blowing all around us.  Have you ever been out in the wind and your breath seems to be sucked from you and you gasp, feeling caught up, lost in the wind, your very breath, gone with the wind? 

I have, I know the feeling and I know this…I need to stand, to simply stand, the breath comes back and I carry on through the storm. 

Some circumstances are beyond our control; whether it is war, sickness or death, fire, flood or wind…stand your ground.

“Therefore put on the full armor of God so that when the day comes,

you may be able to stand your ground and after you have done everything, just stand”

Ephesians 6:13

So, I watched the sky move, I wondered about the rain… gone for the moment; the stars twinkling bright, the clouds rolling past, blowing in the wind…God whispering good night.

I love that.