You can’t beat it; you might as well join it.
We have a massive oak tree behind our house that lets loose its leaves in installments. I imagine they wait until I have put away my leaf blower, hung up my jacket, and am reclined in an easy chair, seeking to recover from my vigorous labor. On that signal, the next contingent say their goodbyes, let loose from mother tree, and make their final journey (as they think) to more or less evenly distribute themselves across the landscape.
It happened like that this Saturday. I’m not fanatical about getting every last leaf up from the grass, but I take it personally when The Oak baits me like this. So, fortified by a cup of tea, I retraced my steps to the garage, primed my leaf blower, gunned its little engine, and stepped outside to do combat again. It was then I discovered that the climate had changed.
It was only a slight change, to be sure, but enough to confirm me in my conspiracy theory. The Wind had joined forces with The Oak. It was not a gale force; that would be too obvious. No, it was toying with me. Little eddies, gusts, here a puff in one direction, then a sudden momentary blast at right angles to the last—just enough to catch the leaves I was blowing and cause them to pirouette, dive and swirl about like well-made kites on a summer’s day. It was obvious that fallen nature around me was working on fallen nature within.
My scheme of working methodically from one corner of the back garden to the other— although it seemed the most efficient way to do the job—was not going to work. If I was going to make any headway, I soon saw I would have to work with the wind.
At that point a parable was born. I realized my little wind machine was no match for God’s. So I sought, albeit with waning agility, to keep the wind at my back. I remembered the words of the Lord Jesus to the multitudes, “Whenever you see a cloud rising out of the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming’; and so it is. And when you see the south wind blow, you say, ‘There will be hot weather,’ and there is. Hypocrites! You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern the times?” (Lk. 12:54-56). I wondered how well I understood the times and trends around me that significantly affect the farming work we have been called to do, in plowing and sowing and reaping.
But winds do not only speak of changing circumstances in our world. We also see in James 1:6, regarding wavering faith and in Ephesians 4:14, concerning “every wind of doctrine” that we are to stand firm against those contrary winds that would blow us off course.
But the lesson brought home to me under the oak on Saturday had to do with the double meaning of pneuma, the “wind” and the “Spirit.” As the Lord Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8). One shouldn’t draw from this that the Spirit’s working is capricious and completely unpredictable. While it is true He often surprises us, He always works consistently with the Word of God and the character of God.
The key, then, is to seek the direction of the Spirit’s working and move with Him. But how is that done? Surely it starts by becoming familiar with the biblical record of His movements, especially in the book of Acts, and by becoming familiar with the character of God, especially through the One in whom dwells “the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9).