The Mystic Wind of God

“There is a mystic wind that blows across our days. Tomorrow it may be different, but now you hear the sound of it. You hear it in lives that are being changed—sometimes suddenly and dramatically, sometimes slowly and painfully. On a Sunday morning a committed atheist and a committed alcoholic listen to the same sermon and their ways are made radically different. In the years to come these widely variant personalities will many times sit down together and find rest in the company of each other. Here the shy learn how to speak with eloquence, the fearful know courage, the once prejudiced white and alienated black call one another ‘friend.’ The orphan finds a parent and the wounded a physician.

The wind blows and you hear the sound of it in the diversity of temperaments that makes up this people and marks each one an individual in the mosaic window that is a church community. No sameness dulls the fabric of the life we have together. A hundred different hues make up the pattern. We have learned that our very uncommonness is the gift we bring to one another; the lamb and the lion do lie down together.

The wind blows and you hear the sound in the many gifts that give expression to our days. A few come with ten talents, some with one, but almost all come with their little gifts clutched in tight fists, having said somewhere in secret, ‘I will use my talent in this way and in that way for this gain and for that gain—always with caution lest I be without in the day of need that will come.’ Hugging talents, hugging possessions, hugging ourselves to ourselves until we learn that the winds that blow through here are the winds of God, that Christ is the breath of life, and that we perish if we hold that breath. Tasks become gifts that enable us to enter into the incarnate life of Christ, who will make us apostles to the city in which we are set.”

From Elizabeth O’Conner, Call to Commitment (2003) 2.

This beautiful description of the church is from a group of believers in Washington D.C. Every time I read it, I am challenged again to reevaluate my commitment to God, his people, and his mission in this world.

The mystic wind of God’s Holy Spirit continually blows through the body of Christ, leaving us changed, calling us to be unified in our diversity, and challenging us to reach out to the hurting, the lonely, and the lost with the love of Christ. That wind blows into our midst when we gather together and break bread in the name of Christ. It touches us as we hear the Word of God proclaimed. It changes us as we truly share our lives together and become the church family that God intended from the beginning. The wind blows and sinners become saints of God, the broken are made whole, and we are transformed to share the likeness of Christ. May the mystic wind of God blow through Lake Orion and make our “ways radically different.” May he transform us into the church that he longs for us to be.