Blow Spirit, Blow!

They hung in the Lobby for more years than I’d care to admit. They were well past their prime. Their bright colors faded. Missing pieces left both contraptions lopsided and unattractive. Still, I couldn't remove them.

I’m referring to the mobiles that hung from the Lobby ceiling until just a few weeks ago. They were made by youngsters in our Wednesday youth bible study years ago, to celebrate Pentecost. Originally, each mobile ferried eight doves made of bright paper. Written on one side was the name of the child who’d traced and cut the dove from a pattern. On the backside of their paper dove, each child had written these words: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … God has anointed me to proclaim Good News!

While the words paraphrase Jesus’ first sermon (see Luke 4:16-21), my reasons for keeping these increasingly unsightly objects in a space of honor was sentimental, not theological. I left these wobbly, colorless mobiles in the Lobby because both pairs of dowel rods, and the fishing lines that suspended the cut-out doves, had been fastened together by Pastor Chuck Schroeder. He completed this task at least two years before his death in 2004.

Removing them, unsightly as they were, was a “departure” I could not make. In the end, what persuaded me was my realizing that the mobiles were single-handedly responsible for nearly fifteen false burglar alarms. It seems our motion sensors were overreacting to the unusual flight pattern these mobiles took on windy days and nights!

No doubt the mobiles could have been moved to another room, or put some place where I reverence way too many treasures from days gone by. But in reality, it was long past time for them to go.

Jesus said, in John 3:8, “You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it's headed next. That's the way it is with everyone 'born from above' by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.”

As a new season of Pentecost unfolds, the Spirit keeps calling us not only to new places, not just to new opportunities for mission, but to new heights of intimacy and belonging with God and with each other. Experiencing this newness will require our making a departure from our comfortable “now,” to what might be an alarming future.

Please pray with me that our “letting go” and our “departing” moves more readily than my redecorating!