God is in the Wind

It was a windy weekend all over the Pacific North West and across Western Canada. It was a wind that was omnipresent in my life. Be it the hurried jaunts outside while working on Saturday, the avalanche reports I read as I look forward to ski season, the news segments capturing headlines, or the experience of sitting on the pier in Bellingham Saturday night being buffeted by the wind.

Here are some of the impacts this wind:

It was a wind that tied me to my past:
“Commuters in Calgary struggled to get to work downtown on Monday after a severe windstorm swept through southern Alberta Sunday, prompting officials to shuthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif the city’s core to traffic as glass and debris rained down on the streets.”
“A strong low-pressure system combined with a Chinook blowing east from the mountains produced sustained winds of 77 km/h, with gusts reaching 144 km/h in Claresholm, equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane, says CBC meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe.”
This is a reflection of where I am from, my hometown, and a meteorological phenomenon with which I am accustomed.

A wind some are blaming on Global warming:
“That same storm caused some damage & a lot of power outages here in BC when it blew through Saturday. Welcome to the world of global warming. More severe storms of greater power are one of the first effects we were warned about.” (CBC news Comments)
This ever-present, ominous, reality that is so easy to ignore because of its magnitude, rears its head again.
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Joy, recreation, and danger are tied to this wind, via avalanche danger:
“Increasing moderate rain or snow in the north Cascades spread southward Sunday afternoon and night along with briefly strong winds and significant cooling. Although in most locations the new snow bonded well to the old refreezing surface, this weather produced a general increase in the danger...especially on higher elevation lee slopes in the northern Cascades where greatest snowfall was received.”

My physical experience of the wind occurred with a group of friends Saturday night. After good food and causing an ongoing disruption in the restaurant because of gregarious laughter, we went to the pier in Bellingham. The wind shook the dock. The waves crashed over the lower sections, and I was struck by the silence of the wind. It makes no noise as it moves. There is the crash of the waves, the howling around one’s head, and the rustle of clothing, but the wind itself is silent. I fell into awe as I realized there are immense power, incredible potential, unfathomable persistence, and causative uncertainty in the wind.

Elijah experienced God in the still small voice; I experienced God this weekend in that wind. The diverse nature of it, the way it affected so many areas of my life, the destructive potential, the silence of it, the macro and the micro, the tie to past and present, and the friendship I experienced while being buffeted from all sides by that Godly wind.