The Way of the Wind

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.” – Ecclesiastes 11:5

I have finally found one thing that is done better by zoom: fifth-grade puberty talks. Parents have the option of joining their children, and students ask questions more honestly. Today they covered conception and gestation, and I was reminded of how downright strange it can seem. I got flashbacks of embryology unit in medical school—not my favorite because we had to memorize all the germ layer derivatives—but fascinating nonetheless. We can boil it all down to line drawings and stages, but who really knows how it is that life comes about? 

The author of Ecclesiastes embraces this mystery. There is a play on words here, for the word for “spirit” is the same as that for “wind.” The latter is itself a theme throughout the book as an embodiment of meaninglessness: “all is vanity and a striving after the wind” (1:14; 2:11, 17, 26). But in this verse, the idea of what we cannot predict or capture is turned over like a coin, and used to describe the way God creates physical life. The other side of realizing the vanity of our own striving is encountering the fearful and mysterious wonder of God’s workings.

Jesus says of entering the kingdom of God, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). These days when we are so preoccupied with illusions of control, when we dwell so oft indoors, it’s good to feel the wind, be reminded of how little we really know.