Let The Warm Wind Guide

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LET THE WARM WIND GUIDE YOU

“You go out yonder in them woods, and you sit yourself down on an old hickory stump and you be real quiet and take notice of everything around you, that’s where you find God,” my daddy said.

Daddy loved his coffee

 

He paused, took a drink of his coffee. It ran over the side of his cup and pooled in the saucer, because he’d overfilled it with milk and yet, it was just about strong enough to make a spoon stand up.

He sat the cup back onto the saucer. “My momma always told me that when you’re lost in the woods, no matter where you are, you climb up on a stump or a big rock or something that lets you feel the wind, and you let it blow on you. You feel that wind ablowin’. If it’s a cold wind, don’t follow it, but if it’s a warm wind, you follow that one and it’ll lead you home.”

The Eternal Wisdom of Simple Folk

Innocent Days

I guess I was about ten years old when Daddy told me that. I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t understand it for many years. Now, I understand it. I’m not sure he understood it or even his mother, but somebody, somewhere down our family tree knew what it meant. Somehow that knowledge got started.

The beautiful piece of wisdom handed down through my paternal grandmother’s family was that home isn’t a place where you stay. It’s a place where you feel warm and welcome, a place where you are. The cold wind in the saying refers to following a direction that isn’t meant for you and the warm wind represents the spiritual knowing that comes when you follow it.

Spiritual knowing isn’t something that can be taught with words alone. It must be realized and allowed. 

Spiritual Knowing is Not Simply Mental Acknowledgement

The spiritual knowing isn’t something that can be taught. It can only be experienced. It can’t be told to you, and you can’t learn about it in a book. You just have to know it personally. There is no other way.

It is the great awakening and once your eyes are open and you have seen, you can’t unsee ever again. This world takes on a different look to you. Everything around you will change, because the way you see it has changed.

 

 

Secret of the Wheelbarrow

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Carrying yesterday’s junk leaves no room for today’s treasures.

DUMP THE JUNK!

About five years ago I bought a new wheelbarrow for the purpose of gardening. However, this spring when I went out to use my wheelbarrow, I found it was useless.

It was useless because of the television, the one that had stopped working a long time ago. I needed to get rid of it; it was useless junk from my past. It was super heavy, too big a burden to carry, so I loaded it onto the wheelbarrow to transport it and then I got sidetracked and left it—for two months!

Recently, I needed to use the wheelbarrow to move dirt as it was time to garden, but when I went out to get it, I realized that I couldn’t put anything in it unless I emptied it.

It wasn’t until I took hold of the handles, guided the wheelbarrow to the barn and unloaded the television that I could use it again for gardening, its original purpose.

IT’S A NEW DAY!

I think our minds are like my wheelbarrow (or any vessel for that matter). So long as we are filled with junk from the past, we are useless in the present.

So often we begin each day with associations to the ones gone before. Each day is a new beginning, but ONLY if we empty the wheelbarrow. There is a passage in the Book of Psalms where David says, “This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.” He is telling us that he started over, every morning with gratitude.

There is also a passage in the Tao Te Ching that talks about how the usefulness of a vessel is in the emptiness of the vessel. Only when my wheelbarrow was emptied of the past, could I use it in the present.

THERE IS ONLY NOW.

In the Book of Hebrews Paul says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen.” NOW. Not yesterday, not twenty years ago, not this morning. Right now. Faith works in the present. It is in the present that we call those things into existence that we may not see with our physical eyes, but if we see them with our spirits, they have no choice but to manifest.

In Hebrews 11:3, Paul teaches us, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” The reference to the word of God here comes from an old Greek word, Rhema (hray-mah) and means a literal utterance, especially a narrative or a command. Solomon tells us that life and death are in the power of the tongue. In other words, when we speak of a thing or dwell on a thing, we draw that thing to ourselves.

If we hang onto negative narratives of the past, old junk, regardless of who put it there, we can’t move forward into today, we cannot know true peace and purpose. I know people who still live in their high school mentality, some who are holding thirty-year-old grudges, some who are hanging onto to pain from childhood, some who simply can’t move on because everyday they wake up with their wheelbarrows full of yesterday’s junk.

So long as we are wheeling around yesterday’s junk we can’t enjoy today’s treasures.

The usefulness of a vessel doesn’t lie in its fullness but in its continuously being emptied and refilled.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens