The morning is so beautiful. The earth is at its most glorious after a storm. The sky a deep blue dotted with white and soft gray clouds, fluffy and kissed on their crowns by the sun’s hot rays. Father Sky has drawn a prize winning pastel rendering of a summertime sky, perfect in its glory.

I was faithful to Mother Nature this afternoon, sitting in the swing after supper watching for the pageant of sunset hidden by a thick layer of dull white cloud curtains. In my imagination, I saw the sun dressed in a formal strapless gown of sequined sunshine yellow, long white gloves on her slender arms, stepping on the stage proudly, her hand on the arm of the handsome Father Sky. As Father Sky walked the sun down the horizon a blaze of watermelon red flooded across the skyline and melted into the aqua and pale huckleberry of the high clouds. The sun dropped off the horizon as the magical colors of twilight raced across the neighborhood.

Father Sky kissed the sun goodnight and stepped from the twilight into the inky dark of the nighttime sky. He pulled the moon and stars from their cozy clouds covers and placed them on the stage of darkness to illuminate the world’s dreams. The moon was a luminous beacon of light in the black abyss of the sky, the stars a tapestry of twinkling diamonds. Night has awakened gloriously as the day goes to sleep sublimely.

A slight wind has softly played my wind chimes today, singing of places it has traveled. I love to wonder about where the wind has been when it arrives here on my porch to kiss my cheeks. Has it dried the tears off someone’s face in Lick Skillet, Alabama, cooled the sweat on a farmer’s brow in Slickpoo, Idaho, or pinged the wind chimes on a porch in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky?

Maybe it’s ruffled the white hair of an old man sitting on a park bench with his memories in Tightwad, Missouri. It’s blown through the needles of Ponderosa pines and cleaned the air in Anaconda, Montana, and cooled off the lizards in Lizard Lick, North Carolina. Love these names of towns. Ran across these places in an old blog today. Chief used to say every word ever spoken is wandering in the wind somewhere. Maybe I’ll hear some of his words in the wind while I ponder in the swing.

There is such beauty in the wind. It makes the world dance and billows the sail boat sails. It can be exquisitely soft or it can be a rolling tornadic monster. I think the cool quiet breezes of an early morning could be God’s whispers to wake the wondrous world each day, talking softy to the birds and the blossoms, blowing the clouds around to make a path for the sun’s golden rays. Was reading about wind this afternoon and came across this sentence — The wind is a broom, sweeping the leaves from the sidewalk. I love that metaphor. The wind can sweep all kinds of things into our lives, including the Holy Spirit.

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination,” Jimmy Dean. The seas of our lives are not always smooth and calm. Our journeys are filled with broken hearts, changes and challenges, all things we experience that make us human. How we react to the rough currents as we sail through life determines the rest of our life’s journey. As we learn how to sail our ship, we’ll overcome the rough waters and experience joy as we learn to navigate life through our faith in God. We need to let God be the skipper of our sailboats.

When we follow Jesus’s teachings, our life’s destination to the pearly gates of heaven is a life long commitment. We get blown off the path of Christianity when the storm winds of temptation blow. We can’t change the direction the wind is blowing but we can change our mindset and through prayers and thanksgiving we can trim our sails and adjust our course to get back on our journey to God and his kingdom of heaven. I love the words of the Sailor’s Prayer — May the seas lie smooth before you. May a gentle breeze forever fill your sails. May sunshine warm your face, and kindness warm your soul.

I think we can compare our faith to the wind. “There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore,” Nicholas Sparks. Some of us quietly go about doing our good deeds not wanting our wind to blow anything off our path or call attention to us. We pray and seek God’s grace in our every day journey of faith.

Other of us scream our faith like a howling wind, making sure our actions are noticed and our faith proclaimed, speaking so loudly others can’t hear the quietness of God’s grace. Nature bows down to the wind and we need to bow down to God in prayer. We can be a messenger of God’s word and the power of the Holy Spirit can wash over us like the wind. God can bring change into our lives just as change happens when the wind blows. In the Bible, God’s power is often represented as wind. God’s wind symbolizes the breath of life.

We have to trust in God’s guidance and let the winds of the Holy Spirit control our direction and guide our lives.

 “God provides the wind, Man must raise the sail.” — St. Augustine