Wind

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I usually suppress any inspiration to write about finding the Kingdom in nature. God speaks pretty loudly through his creation, so I have no good explanation. Today I have surrendered that hesitancy. The Holy Spirit really gave me no choice.

This morning I was sitting on my back patio for my devotions. I've been pretty stagnant devotionally, focused more on doing for God than listening to him. Our patio sits against a pond and woods beyond. We have a pretty strong wind this morning and a rain approaching. As I was praying for God to reveal himself today, I saw two ducks flying down the pond like rockets before the wind. They almost immediately returned, flying more slowly against the wind and as they reached a spot directly opposite me they surrendered to the wind and went straight up and then turned to fly downwind again.

My heart opened to the message of the Kingdom taught by the ducks. The Holy Spirit appears in scripture often as a wind. In Acts 2:2, for example, the Spirit descended with the sound of a rushing wind. Jesus promised the Spirit will be our guide. John 16:13. So what I saw in the ducks this morning was what happens when we fly with the wind of the Holy Spirit at our backs, guiding us swiftly on our course, and how difficult life can become when we resist the Spirit, flying against the force of the Spirit-wind.

It is counterintuitive, but we simply cannot live in the Kingdom by the force of our own will. We want to remain in control, but as long as we try to live our lives by our own choices, even if those choices are what we think serve Christ, we will find ourselves flying against the wind of the Spirit. Ah, but once we surrender our will to Christ, the wind we find at our backs will take us to places beyond our imagining and we will see Christ and the Kingdom from a new perspective. So fly with the Wind!

© 2023, Thomas M. Trezise


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