***What y’all will find below is an adapted version of a staff devotion I sent out on July 1st, 2019. I couldn’t help but think of this devotion as we are beginning a strange season of life at Centennial.***
“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Here’s a poem I wrote in 2013, titled “John 3:8.”
Skeleton trees feel no breeze,
There is no life, there are no leaves.I am not free, I feel no breeze,
There is no life, ‘cept in belief.Give me leaves to take my leave
From the windless jail of death…And skeleton trees.
2013 marked my first year in seminary. Before then, I knew I was not the most spiritual person, but I realized the gravity of the situation while attending classes that year. My professors’ words were like honey. I couldn’t get enough! As I studied more, reviewed my copious amounts of notes, and read the Bible, I realized the startling truth. The reason I so deeply loved my professors’ words lay in the fact that their words were God’s Word. They were either directly quoting Scripture or alluding to it in the natural flow of their speech.
This severely convicted me.
I was made keenly aware of my own lack of spiritual knowledge. With that as a backdrop, I composed those few lines above.
Now it’s early 2020, a pandemic is upon us, and I recalled that poem yet again. It’s been stuck in my head for a week now, and I believe it’s because I’m feeling the same feelings I had in 2013. Like me then (and now!), as you soberly assess your spiritual life, are you growing in your knowledge of God and who he is? Are you praying? And then an extremely important follow-up: why are you doing these things in the first place?
Pray with me for God’s Spirit to blow here and now—in you and those around you. And for those of us who have felt the sweet warmth of the blowing of the Spirit of God, may we be constantly washed with the water of the Word (Ephesians 5:26), nourished by the freely given water of life (Revelation 21:6), and acknowledge our salvation is by the living water that never runs dry—Jesus Christ himself (John 4:7-15).
May it be that God blows in our direction, and may he do so now (John 3:8)! Unlike skeleton trees, may we be those “planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1:3).