Blow, Wind, Blow

Every night when I was little, my dad read us a chapter of the "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  I recently recalled one of my favorite moments in The Long Winter.  Laura has survived 300 pages of a crazy blizzard winter, and is lying covered up in bed.  She hears something...

"...there was another sound, a tiny, uncertain, liquid sound that she could not understand.  She listened as hard as she could.  She uncovered her ear to listen and the cold did not bite her cheek.  The dark was warmer.  She put out her hand and felt only a coolness.  The little sound that she heard was a trickling of water-drops.  The eaves were dripping.  Then she knew.

She sprang up in bed and called aloud, 'Pa! Pa! The Chinook is blowing!'

'I hear it, Laura,' Pa answered from the other room.  'Spring has come.  Go back to sleep.'

...Blissfully Laura stretched out in bed; she put both arms on top of the quilts and they were not very cold."

(The Long Winter pp. 311-312)

I love this part.  With a warm breath of wind, the snow and danger and worry and tension of the previous months is gone, dissolved into the ground to prepare the soil for planting.  The warm wind allows the prairie family to sleep, sleep deeply, well, blissfully - uncold, unafraid.


I have a thing for warm winds, too.  My mom says I was colicky as a baby.  She says the only thing that would quiet my screaming was a hair dryer, set to "low" and trained on my belly.  Eventually just the sound of the hair dryer was enough to calm me.  In fact, she recorded the running hair dryer on a cassette and brought it to the church nursery, so they could just play my tape if I started crying!

When I was twelve, I always got up early with my two-year old sister, Melody.  I was allowed to turn up the thermostat to 69 when I woke up.  After turning it on, we would race to the floor register, sit on either side of it, and position our nightgowns around it so we each got half of the warm air flowing up.  At first the metal was so cold on our feet and we shivered in anticipation of the bliss to come.  And then the flow of warm air started and we sighed contentedly.  We were still a little sleepy, so we rested our chins on our knees and closed our eyes, enjoying the luxurious warm air surrounding us on a cold morning.  It looked like this picture I got from this blog, except with two girls in billowing nightgowns.

This last week, Joe and I went to Kauai for a few days.  One morning I woke up early to watch the sun rise.  It was still night outside.  I just wore shorts and a sweatshirt, and immediately got goosebumps from the light chill.  I wondered if I should go back inside, wondered if I would be too cold out here, when I realized that I was actually quite comfortable.  I wondered why; it seemed like even at this temperature back home, I would have required a jacket and long pants.  And then I realized it was the warm wind, that gave little bits of heat as it wrapped around my body and then flew away.  Most winds take heat away, but this wind brought tiny packets of heat to me.  It was a life-giving, not a life-draining, wind.  It was so pleasant, so comforting.  Kind of like this (not mine, see upper right of picture for source):

The first mention of "wind" in the Bible is Genesis 8:1, right after the Flood has drowned all the world's residents and animals except for Noah and his family: "But God remembered Noah...and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded."  I find it so cool that the first wind in the Bible was a comforting, healing, life-giving wind - just like the winter-ending Chinook, or like the hair dryer that soothed a colicky baby, or like the warm sister-bonding moments on cold mornings over the register, or like the cool tropical island breeze that comforted me while I waited for the sun to rise.

Warm wind comforts me, just like it comforted Noah.

Sometimes wind is uncomfortable - like when it brought Laura's family a long, dangerous blizzard, or in the Bible when east winds bring drought and pestilence.  In Genesis 41:6, an east wind scorches the crops.  In Exodus 10:13, the east wind brings locusts to plague Egypt.

But then a few verses later, in Exodus 10:19, "the LORD changed the wind to a very strong west wind, which caught up the locusts and carried them into the Red Sea. Not a locust was left anywhere in Egypt."  And later, in Numbers 11:31, God uses a wind to bring in quail for the Israelites to eat.

According to these references, though, whether wind is hot and dry and crop-drying, or cold and bitter and bone-chilling, or warm and humid and life-giving - it all comes from the Lord.  Even the south wind that collapsed Job's house and killed his family in Job 1:19 was permitted by God.  Sometimes I don't know the purpose of these winds.  Sometimes it makes me angry that God would withhold comfort and allow pain.  It seems unfair.

I guess I have to remember that God can't do anything "unfair."  On my own merit I have no right, no entitlement, to life or comfort or pleasure or family.  Sometimes I think that by being "good" I deserve to have good things happen to me.  Really though, if I weren't covered by Jesus, I would look just as sinful to God as the worst rapist or murderer.

So I will praise him so hard for the warm winds that I love.  And then the hot dry winds or the cold bitter winds come, I will be like Job, and just say, "The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised."

I just know heaven will be filled with a comforting, warm, tropical, life-giving, Kauai wind!