Seeing the Wind

It is snowing today where I live. It started a few hours ago, and has steadily increased. But the worst part is not the snow, it’s the wind. Around here the wind is brutal. When I lived in Florida I used to say “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” Now that I live in the Texas Panhandle, I say “it’s not the cold, it’s the wind.”

The crazy thing about it when it snows like this is driving around. I had to run some errands in the snow today, and you can see the wind blowing the snow around. It’s like driving across the top of a witch’s caldron from the movies or something. The roads look like they are covered in dry ice, as you see the wind moving back and forth, creating these streams of blowing snow that are almost mesmerizing.

Often when we talk about God we compare Him to the wind. We say “you can see the effects of the wind, but you can’t see the wind,” and God works a lot like that. But today, while I know I didn’t actually see the wind, I saw about as close as you can get to it without some kind of weather technology. I saw the wind today when I saw what it was doing to the snow because the snow completely let the wind have its way. It wasn’t anchored to anything, like a flag or a tree might be, but was totally controlled by the wind. I think that while we can’t literally see God, the closest we come is when we are like that snow, allowing Him to move us at His will. We see Him in our lives when we see the effect of His presence on us in such a way that we are holding on to nothing but Him.