Sights and Insights
Devotion for Sept. 28, 2021
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. – Romans 15:13 (NRSV)
I got caught out in the rain this afternoon. It was hardly surprising that it rained. In fact, I had spent the morning trying to convince my children to take along their raincoats to school because it was likely to be raining when they came home, though my efforts did not convince them. Yet I still ended up drenched. I was leaving the office at church, knowing it was going to rain eventually, when I realized I had more things to bring home with me than I had anticipated. It took several trips, and as I started the first one the skies open up. I moved my car closer to the door to shorten the trips, but it was raining so hard that it made little difference.
It’s one thing to know that something is going to happen eventually. I knew it was going to rain today. Knowing that something will happen sooner or later is different from when it actually happens. This is true of many things in life. Certainly it is an aspect of the death of a loved one who has long been ill. We prepare ourselves to a degree, but it is not quite the same as the grief when the time actually comes. Long-expected things can still come upon us suddenly.
I would suggest that this is also the way of the Holy Spirit. We have long been promised that the Holy Spirit will come upon us. In faith we can even say that it is always already true that the Spirit is with us. Yet it can still be surprising to have moments of recognizing the Holy Spirit at work around us. Moments of unexpected connections, of breakthroughs in insight into the lives of others, and surprising moments of joy are all signs of the working of the Spirit. We could never anticipate the arrival of such moments, and yet we also know that they are promised and will occur sooner or later. The Holy Spirit is steady and reliable, yet at the same time always unexpected. The arrival of such moments catches us unaware, and moves us in ways that exceed anything we could expect or imagine. Thank God for such moments, when the water of life in the Holy Spirit rains down on us.