When the Wind Blows

     The blowing of a train whistle while I was trying to go to sleep last night kept me awake.  Train whistles usually have a lonely and mournful sound to me, especially from a distance.  And during the day I find the sound oddly reassuring, a comfortable background affirmation that life and commerce are plodding along predictably.  But last night it was just plain irritating.

Howard, my husband, told me a lady was in the store where he works part-time the other day transacting some business, when she stopped mid-sentence and said, "Oh, I miss that sound."  A train was passing by a few blocks away and she heard the whistle blowing.  She was from Blackwell, and trains do not go through there anymore.

I was surprised one day when we passed by the building that formerly housed my father-in-law's grocery store in Blackwell.  "I thought there were some railroad tracks here," I puzzled, looking around.  They had been pulled up!  The street sign, "Frisco" stood there in mute testimony of former days. The trains had disappeared sometime during the many years we lived in the South.

After the 9/ll attacks when we were living in the country in Mississippi, I remember how we missed  the planes flying overhead for several weeks in the immediate aftermath when they had been grounded for security reasons.  We had both a military and a commercial airport a few  miles away in Gulfport, and there was normally a lot of activity.  We used to sit in a yard swing Howard had hung from the friendly branch of a tree and watch the planes in our hilltop sky on "Windy Acres."  It seemed strange for the night sky to be empty, the lights twinkling above only from the stars.

"The wind bloweth where it listeth (wishes)," Jesus said, "and thou hearest the sound thereof, but can't not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit."  He was explaining being born again to Nicodemus, who had come to Him by night with his questions.  Perhaps He was saying that we hear the wind with our natural ears, but we hear God with our spirit.  The words of a poem by Christina Rosetti that I read in school comes to mind:

Who hath seen the wind?

Neither I nor you; 

But when the leaves hang trembling

The wind is passing through

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the leaves bow down their heads

The wind is passing by.

We can say the same thing of the Holy Spirit: We can be left trembling, and we will certainly bow down our heads.