The Full Force Of The Wind

The Wind In the Willows, Gone With The Wind, Chasing the Wind and A Killer in the Wind are some book titles with wind in the title. Google says there are 162,000 results. Wind is much on my mind today. Oklahoma is on everybody’s mind today because of the wind. Wind of two-hundred plus miles per hour in a hurricane ranked as a leader in its category. It is impossible to relate to the level of loss brought on by such a disaster.

On a much, much smaller scale I am disappointed due to the wind. Tomorrow is a training day and the weather forecast here is for wind everyplace. In the scheme of things it is obviously a small thing. Still it will make tomorrow’s ride seem mostly work and very little of pleasure.

In poetry and classic literature wind speaks to us of our transitory stay here and of the impermanence of our life as echoed in the popular Livgren song, “All we are is dust in the wind.” The writer of Ecclesiastes sobers us with words about the wind saying, “Thus I considered all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted, and behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun.” Isaiah compares the speed and devastation of the wind with our own brokenness for ‘all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.’

There is no real shelter from the full force of the wind and no escape from insignificance. Yet there will come a day when, “Behold, a king will reign righteously and princes will rule justly. Each will be like a refuge from the wind and a shelter from the storm, Like streams of water in a dry country, like the shade of a huge rock in a parched land. Then the eyes of those who see will not be blinded, And the ears of those who hear will listen.”