Wind

It’s windy. Not just windy, very windy. Stupendously windy, fantastically windy, remarkably windy, and extra-ordinarily windy. It's so windy the tornados have gone vacationing to South America. It's so windy the hurricanes are jealous. Tempests envy the brute gale force of Nebraska.

When you are driving down the road and you open the window a crack, you know how loud the wind can be. Imagine that in reverse, you are standing still and the whole world is roaring past you at fifty miles per hour. Now imagine that going non-stop for three days. I wonder where all that wind can come from. There must be giant vacuums opening up in Mexico because all of their air is being sucked into Nebraska. Maybe it’s the other way around, maybe the vacuum is in Canada.

I tell people that I don’t know what they have done with the Nebraska that I left so many years ago, and they say it has always been this way. They are wrong. The Nebraska I remember was timeless and unmoving, not this rushing, howling lunacy. I fear that the men in the white coats will come soon to take this Nebraska away. Or maybe I desire it. So easily can you forget that the world can be still and quiet.

The wind roars like a lion and howls like a coyote. It whistles like a boiling tea-kettle and moans like a restless spirit. Trees creak, shingles flap, and barn doors crack like the first shot of hunting season. The power lines are a gospel choir ushering in doomsday. Neighbors shout to be heard over the tumult and they sound miles away. If they shouted at you from upwind, their voices would slap you in the face like an angry mother.

The wind thunders across the plains like a herd of startled buffalo. It gallops to and fro like unbroken horses, crossing the earth in great strides. It is swifter than deer and quicker than hares. It mocks the birds, shoving them aside thoughtlessly.

Outside we are buffeted by the wind; inside we are buffeted by the sound of the wind. The wind is an uproar; a cacophony of howling, moaning ghosts; God's own bellows unleashed. Wind like this could drive a person mad.

Patrick Swayze and Bette Midler never knew wind like this. Benjamin Franklin would have stayed indoors in such a gale. Winds this ferocious would have kept Odysseus at sea for another twenty years.

The wind is endless, tireless, pitiless, bottomless. It is inexhaustible, incomprehensible, inconceivable, and incredible. The wind is unending, unceasing, unyeilding, unrelenting. It is forever, eternal, constant and infinite.

Other than that, life is pretty good.

John 3:8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Genesis 8:1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.

Matthew 14:30 But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!"