By Pastor Leah Fintel Krotz, Trinity Lutheran Church, Bruning
Do you ever get tired of the wind? We’ve had some extremely windy days this spring, and with the dry ground, dust seems to always be in the air when the wind blows. A light breeze can be refreshing, but the gale-force winds we often experience here in the Great Plains are no picnic.
In the 1980s, a research facility called Biosphere 2 built a closed ecosystem to test what it would take to eventually colonize space. The researchers tried to think of everything to make the completely enclosed dome as much like nature as possible. Trees planted inside sprung up and appeared to thrive. Then they began to fail.
Botanists could find no evidence of disease or borers or weevils. There was nothing to cause the trees to topple; the conditions were perfect. And then they realized what was missing—something so simple, yet nonexistent within the carefully controlled structure. It was wind.
The air was too still, too serene—an ease that guaranteed the trees were doomed. You see, it’s the pressure and variation of natural wind that causes trees to strengthen and their roots to grow. Though the trees of Biosphere 2 had all the sun, soil, and water they needed, in the absence of changing winds they built no resilience, and they eventually fell under the weight of their own abundance.
As a native of Nebraska and Kansas, I complain about the wind. A lot! But reading about the necessity of wind to strengthen trees made me think about the wind in a new way. Maybe it makes US stronger too. Maybe it’s the rough times, the difficulties and suffering, that drive us closer to God.
Even though we don’t like painful experiences, we can try to see the hand of God when the winds buffet us, and take comfort in the truth that our roots are growing deeper in Him.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” -Romans 5:3-5
