ties of love
On the same day my sister-friend tells me in the morning that she has an alarm set on her phone to pray for me—just me, the chime stopping her mid-sentence, the two of us standing on a windswept corner anticipating rain–that everlasting reminder of God’s kindness, with a flurry of leaves skittering all around our feet—in the afternoon of that same day, Zoe’s watch dings at 3:20, and mid-praiseworthy-story, she says, “–wait, I need to pray.”
She stops right in the doorway of my office, her long, golden-brown hair still swinging enthusiastically, and just starts talking to God, telling Him, this is what I’m thinking, but I know you’ll do even more.
In book-ending moments, I close my eyes and whisper thanks, recognizing in their lives a purposeful answer to an invitation God has lately extended to me too, to live by the kind of reliant faith that will stop me still on a dime to pray. I realize all over again that I’m not alone, that I hear more clearly because they have also heard and received and responded, sharing their responses with me. I’ve got sisters, some of them even my daughters, all of us knowing more and more that in a world full of worries tearing us to pieces, nothing ties us together like the love of God.
Come to me, He says, and well, we’re listening. We’re turning toward Him together, like pinwheels.
I drew them with cords of kindness, God said through the prophet Hosea, with ties of love.
On the same day, in the early morning, I read this line, dragging one finger along the words, imagining countless unbreakable bonds, glinting invisibly between us and God, connecting us like holy umbilicals, making a waterfall of the living water welling up within us. I remember something Ann Voskamp in one of her books brought out about hesed, the steadfast love of God, that it is an attachment love by which God forever bonds Himself to His people. I think about how our relational God, who in triune nature embodies relationship, purchased oneness and union for us by sacrificing Himself, abolishing isolation. In light of all this, I am in awe, humbled that I can ever be tempted to believe I walk alone.
It’s trendy now to speak of the interconnectedness of life, especially in the context of the environmental world with its web of ecosystems, less so to consider that the ever-loving ever-presence of God actually creates the bonds extending between us, holding us and all the world together. But here’s the truth: the creative wisdom of God wrote harmony into the unmarred fabric of creation.
This same day, while out walking under the summer sun, I notice the wind, how it breaks the heat like shade, how it drives petals from the Crepe Myrtle trees, sending them dancing down the street like some kind of vibrant parade, all magically-not-magically twirling in the same direction. I seem to be moving right with them.
Jesus said this is how it is with those born of the Spirit, because we perceive the presence and movement of the Spirit as we perceive the wind, seeing not the wind itself but hearing its sound, watching the evidence of its movement in the things it moves. I think again of Hosea, how he quoted God saying, I drew them–or, I led them—with cords of kindness, with ties of love. As God moves, we who live in union with Him move along with Him, like sheep closely following their shepherd, drawn to His special smell, by the distinct sound of His voice.
On this same day, on a computer call, yet another sister-friend tells me she’s praying for me, using nearly the same words as the one who literally set an alarm by praying me held together. The two of them don’t even know each other.
This same day, as I sit at my computer writing, hearing the wind spinning through the leaves of the giant maple outside our office window, still yet another sister sends a picture of a book she’s reading, a two-page spread she felt moved to share with me.
In the ancient Greek words of New Testament scripture, pneuma, the word translated Holy Spirit, literally means a gust of air, a current of wind, or a breath. When God gives Life to people, He breathes His own breath into them, this not only an inflation of the lungs but the indwelling of a transforming, bonding, sealing power that exchanges mortal life for immortality.
I look down at my phone, just a glance that has me enlarging my friend’s sent pages with my fingers. I have just typed a snatch of Romans into a piece I’m writing, and these pages, a discourse on the very thing God’s been training me to see—see, see, He’s been saying, touching my eyes–end with exactly the verses that still tingle on the tips of my fingers. I hit reply on my phone, type, well, hello wind of the Spirit. I can’t see of course, but I feel my sister grin, on down the cord that binds, as she reads this.
We’re petals, shaken from the trees, dancing all together along the Way.
Ask us if the Spirit’s real and we’ll tell you a thousand stories like these, about our heart-thumping, 24 everyday, always interconnected adventure. You could take a sampling far and wide, and if you’ve got ears to hear and eyes to see, you’d catch sight of the presence of God the only way you can, not where He’s from or where He’s going, just the compelling love of Him collecting us, each one, picking us up as He’s been known to do, setting us down somewhere further on. He’s a slipstream, a highway, Isaiah’s Way where the rescued return; He’s our Way, and we’re on the way, and I’m telling you, friend, this is the thread—He is thread–that holds the world together.
This is not, of course, some mystical magic trick and we are nothing short of messy and fragile and elegantly drawn, light as nothing. There are delicate bruises at our edges, places torn away. We’d be tumbleweed except that the Wind that carries us along is also His life-giving, fruit-bearing breath. So, we live, even though we’ve fallen. And our thoughts are small, yes, but He is more than we are, and in Him, we are more together than we are apart. He loves to bring back into harmony people who would otherwise not know the first thing about being connected.
It’s funny how we humans intellectualize, how we can study collective consciousness and transgenerational trauma and theorize about time loops and alternate realities and avoid the careful consideration of an everlasting God inhabiting all of time and space, reaching through it all—and all of us—with His love. We can marvel over the discovery that trees share resources, detecting need in each other through complex systems of roots below ground, helped along by fungal fibers in the soil, and never wonder whether these realities are but shadows, dim reflections, evidence of the Wind, pointing to greater realities beyond human comprehension.
But I’m here to tell you, if you seek connection as deeply and desperately as I do: There’s only one bond that lasts forever, those cords of His kindness, those ties of His love, drawing everything and everyone back into harmony in Him.
