Out Our Way: When the chinook winds blow

Out our way, it's calving season and, just as regular as clockwork, the Alberta Clippers have come.

It is February, and that's what we expect up here on the Hi-Line. Yet the skies are clear and the sun is bright most days, and we expect the chinook winds to come and take it all away in a week or so.

As I tell my friends back East, the winters out here can be harsh, but out our way, God sends us reminders of spring even in February when the chinook winds blow.

I remember when I was studying Hebrew and Greek in seminary, discovering that in both Biblical languages, the word for "Spirit" is also the word for "Breath," and also the word for "Wind." Thus in Genesis, the creation begins with a wind, which is the breath of God, which is the Spirit of God.

Sometimes that gentle warm chinook wind is a reminder of the Spirit of God - the Breath of God hovering over us and giving us life.

There are days when life is as harsh as a winter storm - it is cold and dark and empty. There are days when life feels like you are standing on a ridge and looking out over a world of nothingness below a dismal grey sky where the sun barely gives any light.

But it will not always be thus. For just as God sends the Hi-Line the chinook winters to remind us spring is coming, so God will send spiritual "chinooks" into the frozen emptiness so many of us feel. And like the true chinook, it will sneak up on us. In our darkest hour a friend's smile, a word, a memory, a song, will suddenly come into our hearts and, for a moment, we feel the warmth and begin to feel life again.

But, like the chinook wind in February, it is not spring. It is still winter and the chinook does not last. Winter is still the reality because we have for just a short time received the promise of spring. And we have felt it and know it is real. Yes, harsh and dark days will still come to us, but now we know they will not last, for we have tasted the promise and experienced it.

In the season of sorrows and darkness that everyone must go through from time to time, God will send us chinook winds from time to time to remind us that this will not last. That sudden unexpected moment when the heart is lifted up, those are God's chinooks. Go back and read those first verses of Genesis where all is darkness and there is only the abyss, until God's chinook wind, the breath and spirit of God, moves across the emptiness and begins to fill it with life.

Yes, winter can be harsh, but it will not last. Spring is coming, and those chinook winds come out of no where to remind and encourage me that this dark season will not last. Though it be February, the chinook reminds me of May.

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Goliath and John Bruington encourage you to enjoy the chinooks when they come, both the physical and the emotional ones. They are the wind, breath and spirit of God