Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
The wind of the Spirit blows through our world, and often through us, but we know not from where the Spirit comes or where He is going. Every turn and weave, every obscure yet intimate passage, every mysterious and sublime movement, and every unknown course between origin and destination is in actuality part of the perfect and ultimate design of God.
We can know this; as the Spirit moves He can move we who believe closer to a consummation beyond our wildest and fondest dreams, to the perfection of God’s plan for the ages and for all eternity. Oh, that we who are the people of God could know more of this truth in our deepest hearts and thus further deepen those hearts, deep calling deep.
All too many of us have lost the wonder and awe we once had for the Divine. We formally knew both these things; first at the beginning of our earthly lives as children of common grace gazing out in perhaps unconscious joy at our creator’s bright handiwork in the world. Then, years later, we knew another kind of wonder and awe as new creatures of saving grace caught up in the early bloom of first love with Jesus Christ, seeing His heart, and His heart for us, for the first time.
The first kind many of us lost when our childhood went dark with abuse and the loss of human security, the second when that which remained unhealed in us led to a narrow legalism that crowded out the love and grace of our newfound Savior.
Yes, many of us have lost both these things but we are no longer content to suffer these losses indefinitely, no longer willing to miss being caught up in the wind of that Spirit. Whatever the cause of the dimness in the eyes of our heart we have once again set them upon our Father through the shed blood of His Son, and we are regaining the vision He always wanted us to have of Him.
Yes, “the world, the flesh and the Devil” would have us stay out of the holy stream of the Spirit, would keep us bound up in the darkness of pain and resentment and the bitter self-righteousness to which they both often lead. But we are too desperate for the God we once knew to let that happen and He, too, is unwilling to let us stay bound. So years into our Christian life we find ourselves beginning to do whatever it takes to let Him free us.
I once wrote that ten seconds of the felt presence of God was better than anything in my life I’d ever known before. What I did not let on at the time was that ten seconds was not nearly enough. It was not enough then and it is not enough now. I want the eyes of my faith to let me see and partake in the awe and wonder of my God for much longer than that, for much longer periods in this life….and forever in the next.
May it be so for all of us who find ourselves yearning, even starving, for a new vision of God. Like a sailing vessel on the sea may we all turn into, and be caught up in, the bracing wind of the Spirit so as to be carried where He wants us to go, into the very heart of the Father through the Son.
Amen.