So, I missed you last weekend. To come clean, I was indulging in a personal obsession. I was enjoying a long-planned dad-and-daughter weekend in the west of France for the start of the 10th “Vendee Globe” single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Our obsession with tracking sailors around the planet began as a family distraction during covid and we remain fans. The Vendee Globe is a 3-month, 24-7 non-stop race of endurance, skill, and strategy requiring competitors to extract an advantage over one another by exploiting the unseen world of global weather patterns. Speed and distance on the water are directly the result of reading and tracking meteorological data invisible to the naked eye.
Those of you who are still with me might be wondering where all this is heading. My point is simple. Followers of Jesus navigate the world by paying close attention to unseen, spiritual realities and responding to the invisible movements of the Holy Spirit. Or as Jesus says:
John 3:8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The Holy Spirit is sent into the world to send us out into the world to promote and proclaim Jesus. The Spirit is not given for our personal gratification but for global transformation and we are invited to catch the wind. The book of Acts demonstrates this abundantly as the Spirit hauls unsuspecting disciples on a spiritual adventure across the eastern Mediterranean. As they go, blown along by the Spirit, they proclaim the good news of Jesus and see this authenticated in changed lives and supernatural signs. (Acts 1:8).
And so it continues today. The mission of the Father is not yet finished, the power of the gospel of Jesus remains undiminished and the work of the Spirit goes on.
In Acts 3, the story of Peter and John’s encounter with the man begging at the beautiful gate, Luke gives us a great example of what following the Spirit into the world looks like. The story begins as John and Peter follow the crowd on their way to daily worship at the temple. However, they are attuned to the hidden movements of the Spirit and their eyes are drawn to a man ignored by everyone else. The Spirit deploys them to convey healing and new life to the man. I love that Peter and John are not so fixated on getting through their to-do list that they cannot be rerouted by God to a man who was overlooked by the crowds of worshippers.
I walked several sections of pilgrim paths here in Scotland on my sabbatical. As I did I became very aware that being a pilgrim in the world is very different from just walking from A to B. Pilgrims are attuned to God and attentive to where he is at work in their surroundings. Pilgrim people are like Moses who spotted a burning bush, stopped, and went over to see what was going on. In my own way, I am seeking to be a pilgrim through the pathways of each day, reminding myself to be attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and building in time to be directed by God to where he is working.
I love too that Peter and John are not preoccupied with what they don’t have but offer what they do. Many of us feel we lack the ability, skill, or resources to meet the physical needs around us never mind address the spiritual challenges. Peter and John remind us that we are not “need-meeters”, or social service gap-fillers but God’s servants. God’s task is always beyond our means but we are invited simply to give what we have.
It’s a great story, I hope you can give it a read before Sunday. I hope this is not a spoiler but we discover that in giving what they had, the man’s begging spot became a beautiful gate to enter into new life and healing.
May we too catch the breeze of the Spirit as we go about our daily routines.
Iain