Wind should not ruin holiday

Curtis K. Shelburne

I wish the wind would let up. I don’t like it.

I can deal fairly well with hot or cold, rain or shine, and just about as many varieties of weather as you care to mention. (Okay, I admit that I don’t care for swamp weather: 90-plus degrees and 90-plus humidity. Given the choice, I’d much prefer a blizzard.)

But, generally speaking, you can usually find a way to cool down or warm up. I’m almost always thankful for rain, and I absolutely love snow. Nothing is more beautiful than a blanket of white, especially if you’re looking at it through a window and sitting in your recliner by the fireplace drinking coffee and reading a good book. The only way that picture could get better is if you have a granddaughter or two in your lap.

But wind’s a different deal. Whether it’s being produced by La Nina, El Nino, or butterfly wings in Canada, I don’t care. I just don’t like it. The less we have of it, the better.

I admit that my opinion is colored. When my wife and I spent some time in East Texas last spring, it was kinda windy. But I learned something. I discovered that wind that is not brown is much less objectionable than wind that is brown, gritty, and completely annoying. I guess it hadn’t occurred to me that wind could actually blow and not move a good bit of acreage around with it. Clear wind is better than brown wind.

But no wind is best of all.

By the way, was there wind in the Garden of Eden before the human tenants besmirched Paradise? I doubt it. Cool, gentle breezes, yes. Wind and dust storms, no.

I don’t need or much appreciate the wind’s loud and obnoxious in-your-face reminder that we live in a fallen, windswept world, a world often oppressed by gale-force wind-waves of suffering and heartache, trouble and trial. People get hurt here, and I’m plenty aware of that without needing to watch West Texas blow by my window.

As I write, it’s a couple of days before Thanksgiving. I’m sitting out in my shed, man-cave, sermon-factory, computer in lap, listening to the wind howl and expecting to see my little dog fly past the window and get stuck in a tree any minute. Less wind would make it seem a lot more “Thanksgiving-y.”

But then I remember H.W. Westermayer’s comment that “the pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts . . . nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.”

And I remember the Apostle Paul’s always-challenging words: “Give thanks in all circumstances.”

I’m working on it.

Still, one of my favorite pictures of the Lord is when he stood in that boat on wind-swept Galilee and calmly told the wind to shut up and shut down. We have it on good authority—His!—that one day he’ll do it again, and every wind of pain will be forever stilled. That hope is itself a great reason to give thanks.