You Cannot Show Me the Wind

The room held about forty people and it went on a long time, and by the end of it he was the only one still sitting down.

Not out of stubbornness. He wanted it. That is the part nobody understood afterwards, and the part he never said out loud. He had driven ninety minutes to be there. He had gone up when they asked people to go up. He had stood with his hands open and his eyes shut and everything in him leaning forward like a man at the edge of a dock.

Around him, things were happening. He could hear it. A woman two rows over was weeping in a way that did not sound like grief. Somebody near the front started laughing, the helpless kind, the kind that has to be let out. A man he had known for eleven years was on his knees on the carpet saying the same short sentence again and again.

And he stood there in the middle of all that with his hands open, and he felt the carpet through his socks, and he thought about whether he had left the immersion heater on.

That was it. That was the whole thing. Nothing arrived.

Afterwards people asked him how it was, and he heard himself say it was good, because what else do you say. He drove the ninety minutes home in the dark. And somewhere around the second junction he made a quiet arrangement with himself that he has kept ever since: he stopped asking. Not because he stopped believing. Because he had concluded, on the only evidence available to him, that he had been skipped.

That was some years ago now. He still goes. He still gives. He sits about two thirds back and he does not stand up any more, and if you asked him why he would tell you he has never been much of a demonstrative man.

That is not why.

The one thing in the book that cannot be produced on demand

Jesus is talking to a careful man. A serious man. A man who has arranged his whole life correctly and has come at night with a real question, and Jesus reaches past everything religious in the room and picks up the wind.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

Now hold that verse still for a moment, because it is doing something specific and almost everybody hurries past it.

He could have chosen fire. Fire you can see. He could have chosen water, and water you can be handed in a cup. He chose the one thing on the whole earth that nobody can display, nobody can command, nobody can schedule, and nobody can hold in their hand and say, here, look.

And He said, that is what it is like for everyone born of the Spirit. Not for the unusual ones. Everyone.

And you are not required to produce evidence of any kind. That is not my leniency: the written word builds the unaccountability into the description of the Spirit itself, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a release in a man who has been trying to produce an exhibit for years.

So consider what you have actually been doing all these years, my friend. You have been holding yourself to a standard that Jesus deliberately did not set. You have been trying to produce an exhibit for a court that was never convened. And the reason you cannot produce it is not that you are empty. It is that the wind does not do exhibits.

Here is the second thing, and I want to lay it down plainly because you have carried the other version of it for a long time.

You did not miss anything by being the one still sitting down.

There is not a queue, and you were not at the back of it. There is not a threshold of hunger you failed to reach, or a wall of reserve you failed to get past. You wanted it enough to drive ninety minutes and stand up in front of forty people with your hands open, and I would call that hunger by any measure a person could use. Nobody is going to tell you tonight that you did not want it enough, because that is a lie, and it is a cruel one, and it has been said to too many people already.

What actually happened in that room is that God moved as He wished, which is precisely what the verse says He does, and part of what He did that night was invisible, and some of that invisible part was in you.

You have been treating the absence of a receipt as proof of an absence. It is not. It never was.

And you were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, and it was done to you. The word puts that verb in the passive and the past and attaches no confirmation step to it anywhere, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing you a document.

Think about wind on an open hillside in March. Nobody has ever seen the wind. What a person sees is the grass going over in a long gray wave, and the hawk holding still in the air without moving a wing, and the smoke off a burn pile lying flat instead of standing up. Every one of those is the wind, and not one of them is the wind, and if you sat there with a jar trying to catch a sample you would go home with nothing and conclude the day was still.

So let me ask you the honest question rather than the flattering one. Not, did you feel something. That question has done you nothing but harm.

Ask instead: what has been going over in the wave?

Because you still go. Years after the night that convinced you that you had been passed over, something in you still gets in the car. You still cannot read certain sentences in the Gospels without something happening in your chest that you would never describe to anybody. You still cannot walk past the same neighbor without praying for him, and you never decided to start. You have forgiven a person you had every ordinary right to keep hating, and you did it more than once, and you would not even count that as spiritual.

That is not a still day. That is a hillside going over in a long gray wave, and you have been standing in the middle of it with a jar.

And you have been living in it while you were trying to measure it. The word says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, and it names things a person does rather than things a person feels, and the Spirit is the one who grows them without asking permission first.