You can’t see the wind but you can see its effects. These are its fruits. Oh, how it howls in our time! 

“Therefore, little children, in the simplicity of heart seek of the Most High to give you the strength to be God’s children and for Satan not to shake you like the wind shakes the branches,” said Mary at Medjugorje (October 25, 2013).

You can observe a pine sway. You can watch a palm bend. You can see the grit suctioned into a whirlwind. You can feel wind. Often, you can tell what it will bring: You can determine its direction. Jesus mentioned this. It can be a breeze that’s sultry or a tempest that is wroth with and wreaks devastation.

There is the tree. We can watch its sway and tell what the atmosphere is up to. We can watch scutting clouds. There are fruits. A fig casts its unripe figs on the ground, we are told in Revelation (6:12-13) — fruit that is useless, that goes to waste — and so we must watch for what falls unripe and to the ground in our own lives or in the lives of those around us.

The visible effects are the gauge; they are the “fruits.”

But you can’t see the air itself. Dust whirls (which we can see) before a gale (Isaiah 17:13).

The same is true in our lives: It is by clouds or sun that we often discern. Wind has two sides, good and bad, like everything else on earth. God sent the wind to part the Red Sea, did He not? At another point, He used the wind to drive the locusts plaguing Egypt into those same waters (Exodus 10:19). That was good. It was wind that settled the floodwaters — caused them to subside — in Noah’s time: A constant amazing miraculous wind. In the New Testament we are told how God sent the Holy Spirit with the sound of air rushing through the Upper Room on Pentecost. Rushing air is wind.

It can also bring evil. Satan is “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), one must recall, and in this vein we think of the great Mayan demon-god called “hurucan” (now spelled “hurricane”).

It can be sent — can the wind — to reveal what is hidden. It can sweep away sand. It can come as chastisement. Did not a great wind break up Jonah’s boat, and when the sun came up, did it not bring a scorching east wind (Jonah 1:4 and 4:8)? 

“Your sons and your daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother’s house, and behold, a great wind came from across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell,” says Job (1:18-19), just as there was revelry in our bars and restaurants and malls and theatres and airports before the pandemic, before political turmoil, before wildfires struck.

“Satan wants to suffocate man and his soul by his contagious wind of hatred and unrest,” intoned the Medjugorje Madonna (January 25, 2015).

When we reap the tornado — “inherit the wind” — often it is to uncover the hidden presence of anger, pride, or lust. We can tell where pride is and where it leads by its results. Pride is an ill wind. Pride is the howl of our time. Pride follows pride. Pride deceives itself. Pride is cruel. Pride is self-centered. Pride is shallow. Pride blinds. Pride lies. Pride tells us we are better than others even when we don’t realize we are viewing ourselves that way. Pride enjoys the mischief of life. Pride is vanity. Pray about this in your life. What is unripe? What fails to come to fruition? What fruit may ripen but then is dried up by the east wind (Ezekiel 19:12)?+

When we sow the wind, we reap that whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

If you want an ill wind to blow, hate those whom you can’t forgive or with whom you disagree.

The wind — even turbulence — is our friend when it blows away the cover of sin and reveals hidden faults and casts away fruit that hangs rotten. The wind blows where it will and you hear the sound of it (John 3:8), and so we discern what is in our lives also by the sound — soft and sweet, or loud and thunderous.

Listen to what wafts through your thoughts. Does it bring a rain that nurtures or winds that shake fruit loose before their time?

Are you a bulwark built on a rock or straw before the wind — chaff which the storm carries away?

“Little children, you are too bound to the earth and earthly things, that is why, Satan is rolling you like the wind rolls the waves of the sea” (August 25, 2016).

The new year is a good time to allow the Holy Spirit to sweep through the inner sanctums of our souls as He did the Upper Room. Only then, when faults are expunged — only when we realize what the wind has whispered to (or roared at) us — do we find the calm atmosphere of the Paraclete.

“I am inviting you to a complete surrender to God. Pray, little children, that Satan may not carry you about like the branches in the wind,” said Mary at Medjugorje (May 25, 1988).”

“Dear children! Today I am calling you to profoundly live your faith and to implore the Most High to strengthen it, so that winds and storms cannot break it” (February 25, 2017).

“Little children, do not permit that the wind of hatred and peacelessness rule in you and around you. You, little children, are called to be love and prayer” (April 25, 2019).