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I was corresponding with a friend, an atheist, trying to explain my new
faith in God through Christ. After two months of writing, I had yet to succeed
in getting her to understand the meaning of knowing Christ as a personal
savior. She had recently read a book on Buddhism which quoted a
famous Lama as saying:
"God is Mind. Buddha is
Mind--Both are totally open, omniscient Mind. They are the same
thing."
She wrote to me:
"The 'Christian God' and the 'Mind' of the Buddhists are
sounding very much alike to me. You see, Buddhists don't use the
word "God," but they do believe in a higher power that is
outside both the natural world and the physical body as we experience
them on a daily basis."
I knelt in prayer and asked the Lord for a way to express to her the
difference between Him, the eternal living God, whose precious gift of life is
an act of creativity and pure love for us, and the state of enlightenment attained by Buddhists,
who believe that life is simply suffering which can be suppressed by detaching
oneself from the world and practicing right thoughts and actions.
The next morning two words came to me: "Sailboat, rowboat."
 The words
seemed very strange and unexpected in my thoughts, but were followed with an insight
that let me see that while these two boats may seem the same in many ways, that
there is one monumental difference in them.
 The sailboat relies on a faith in
something intangible, the wind, while the rowboat relies on one's own
efforts. The simple, but profound, differences of the two flowed into my
thoughts. Though I'd never done any fictional writing, I was led to write a story
called "The Wind and the Waves" of two people on a journey, which I
sent to my friend. The story was filled with references to having
faith in the wind, including this dialogue between the two characters:
"How can you have any faith in
the wind? You can't see it. You can't touch it. You certainly can't
control it. You don't even know if it will be there when you need
it!," said Bud.
Chris responded "I could never reach my destination without the
wind. I know that it will take me where I am to go. The wind is my
strength and my peace."
Bud shook his head in bewilderment and disbelief, saying, "I have
come to believe in a higher force within me that is my source of
strength and peace."
Chris considered this for a moment and then said, "Perhaps, but you
are trying to reach your destination by your own efforts. Your journey
is over when you reach the limit of all that is within you. The wind,
however, will carry me with it forever."
Incredibly, while my story was in the mail, my friend wrote this in a
letter to another friend:
"I wonder if the
wind is blowing through your yard today. I wonder if you have noted
it, and whether and how it has affected you. It is blowing here in my town
with great strength. It is whistling through my windows and hurtling dry
leaves across the lawn. A stronger wind has not blown in many months. I
read in a book just last week that in the Middle Ages, people believed
quite literally that a blowing wind was in fact the breath of God. Today I listen to the wind with new ears. Tell me,
if you
will ... what do you make of the blowing wind? What do you make of
God?"
Two days letter, my story made its journey of over 500
miles and arrived in her mail. My friend was
stunned at the references to having faith in the wind. She wrote to
me,
"How could you have known that I had read about the wind being thought
of as the breath of God? How could you have known that the wind was
blowing very strongly here as I wrote my letter
to my friend Mary suggesting that perhaps New Testament Bible stories were reflections of God? I
cannot tell you how important the wind seemed to me as I wrote to Mary
that day. Then when I got home two days later I found your letter in my mailbox. Your words
jumped off the page at me: "The wind? How can you have any
faith in the wind? I could never reach my destination without the wind.
The wind is my strength and my peace. The presence of the wind...was
beginning to stir about him. Apart from the wind he could do nothing.
The wind was still with him, carrying him forward the wind embraced
Chris.. if etc., etc." I am almost convinced that I should
make something of this. This is almost too strange to have been a
coincidence.
This experience became the turning point at which my friend began to
believe in God. I knew that God had answered my prayer and thanked
Him, but I learned something
too by this: Nothing I do by my
own efforts will bring someone to God, but, through faith, God answers
prayers to touch other's lives in a way that I could never conceive, or
control. It is my prayer that God will touch your life too in a way
that you will know His presence and love.
"No
one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him."
Words of Jesus Christ in John 6:44
"The wind
blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell
where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born
of the Spirit."
Words of Jesus Christ in John 3:8
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