Wind of life....

Colorado... I was blessed to grow up there, and not just anywhere, but at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.  Morning bus rides to school in winter meant a view of snow-covered mountains turned pink or purple by the rising sun.  Driving home from after-school activities as a high school student meant cresting a rolling foothill to see cumulus clouds sitting just above rugged peaks, rays of sun shooting between the clouds as though the gates of heaven were opening and the hidden brilliance behind the pearly gates was spilling out.  Spring drives through the country meant rolling fields of golden, fallow fields of cut corn alternating with the green carpet of new sprigs of corn, all sweeping up to indigo mountains that exploded upward into snow-capped peaks towering into skies so deep a blue you thought you might be able to dive into them.

Most people would also mention cold, snowy winters.  Mornings where you wake up and underneath the layer of snow on your windshield is a layer of ice you have to spend nearly twenty minutes scraping away.  It meant driving through the mountains to witness pine trees frosted overnight by snow, each needle now individually coated in white as through it had sprouted little, white hairs.

Paired with this is brutal summers in the high nineties with next to no humidity.  Hills once purple with June grass turn brown.  Green fields turn to the dusky yellow of dried-out corn husks, the vegetation actually crunching underfoot, the ground cracking, dust rising at every footstep.  You can't drink enough water, and being at high altitude, it only takes ten minutes of sun to turn you into a lobster.

One feature of Colorado a lot of people don't seem to remember, though... is the wind.  Colorado has powerful winds that rip down off the peaks from the clouds above them and tear across the plains in gusts as powerful as the winds of category 1 hurricanes.  The strongest wind gust in Colorado history was 147mph, the speed of the winds in a category 4 hurricane.  I have seen flag poles bent in half, semi trucks pushed over, cars flipped, and in a humorous instance, a rooster flipped over on his back and blown head-first across a yard.  It's a common practice of Coloradans everywhere to come home from work and walk down the street to find where the wind has taken their trashcan on trash day.

Where am I going in all this talk of wind?  Today, I read Acts 2:1-13.  It accounts the day of Pentecost, when the disciples were given the Holy Spirit.  As they were sitting in the house, Luke records in verse 2 that when the Holy Spirit came, "Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting."

As a girl, my bedroom was on the west side of the house.  For those who have never lived on Colorado's east slope: that's the side of the house facing the mountains.  When wind storms came up, it was a very noisy room to be in, especially unfortunate at night when you're a light sleeper.  Reading verse 2 of this passage took me back to that memory of wind in Colorado: of the incredible noise and power of wind.  In the summers in Colorado, wind takes camp fires or the spark of a cigarette and turns them into uncontrollable wildfires that consume everything in their path.  Doubt me?  Just look up the Waldo Canyon Fire, the High Park Fire, or the Hayman Fire.  They are devastating occurrences, and are feared in Colorado the way hurricanes are in the South.

Yet these winds are nothing to the winds of God.  The first record of the wind of God we have is in Genesis 2:7(ESV), when God "breathed into [Adam's] nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."  The wind from God brought life itself.  And from the very beginning, it implied an intimacy with the creation of man that God gave to no other being.  For in this passage, the Hebrew used to discuss God breathing into Adam implies the concept of God literally taking Adam into His arms, holding him close, and breathing life into his empty frame.  All the rest of creation was made with a single command.  But for Adam, God set Him apart, immediately showed a tenderness and concern for humanity that He showed to no other creature in creation.

And with Eve, God showed no less partiality.  For, just as Adam was created in a completely unique way from all other creatures... so Eve was created in a completely unique way, even from Adam.  While Adam God "formed...from the dust of the ground" (Genesis 2:7a), with Eve, God, "took one of the man's ribs [and] made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man" (Genesis 2:12-22).  Just as God was "hands on" in the creation of Adam, so He was with Eve.  However, unlike Adam, Eve was crafted from living tissue.  Through this, God distinguished humanity, both man and woman, from all creation.  From the dawn of time, He has told us "You are unique.  You are special.  I made you with not just my word, but the very work of my hands and the breath of my body."

Therefore, in Acts, when the wind blew through the house... it was a reminder of that "chosenness" which began at creation... and was heralding an even greater intimacy: God, Himself, living within us.  Not only do we breath with the breath of God, but at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to live within the Apostles.  Through their preaching of the Gospel that day, the Holy Spirit also came to live in the hearts of 3000 people who became Christians from hearing the Message.  God spoke life at creation, and He spoke again through His Apostles to bring eternal life into the hearts of believers.

But it didn't end there.

Today... thousands of years from that morning when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles as "tongues of fire," we, too, carry within us that same Spirit.  And when we speak the Truth of the Gospel, we are speaking the same life into peoples hearts that was first breathed into mankind from the very mouth of God on the sixth day of creation.