Wind
My wife, Jennie, was making fun of the weather guy on TV the other day when he was forecasting the wind speed by the hour. “At noon today the wind speed should be 20 miles per hour. By three p.m. it will drop to 17 miles per hour” and so forth. Who cares? In Oklahoma it’s almost always windy. One simply learns to lean into the wind and never wear a hat. Umbrellas are useless because the wind folds them inside out. Besides the rain comes in from the side rather than falling from above.
I took this picture from inside my car yesterday because it was easier to stay out of the wind. Blustering wind makes it difficult to hold the camera still resulting in less than crisp pictures. These two symbols spoke to me about the nature of existing in constant wind. You can see how the western gales have shaped this tree. Many of the trees, especially those on the plains, take on this permanently hunched shape like a person turning their back to the wind. If they want to stand firm in the constant force, they must bend, give way, and be dwarfed from their natural majesty. The other symbol, the windmill, stands tall and erect. It is designed to turn its face into the wind and use the wind’s energy to pump water from the ground wells for livestock. Rather than the wind doing damage, it provides power.
Sometimes the winds seems to blow perpetually in our lives. That is, we are continually bombarded with life hindrances and struggles, and there doesn’t seem to be any relief. Whether it is blowing at 20 mph or 17 mph is irrelevant–we just know it seems to be trying to blow us over. Occasionally, the wind succeeds in uprooting trees and breaking off branches. In the same way, the constant force of life’s problems sometimes bring us to the ground as well. More often, however, we simply hunker down and allow the wind to misshape us, to distort our lives. The other alternative is to turn our face into the wind rather than away from it, to accept it as a given, and to use it to pump hope and possibility from the deep wells of our soul.
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