One birthday I gave my husband a wind chime.  It hangs on a tree outside our kitchen window. When the wind blows, it produces this oddly haunting and beautiful music. Let’s imagine ourselves as living wind chimes. Daily open, available, and chiming with great expectation for how the Spirit will creatively blow through us, work in our lives, reveal new possibilities, heal us and bring hope and joy again. Always it is a choice. God’s wind-blowing spirit in my life and yours has always been there, sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly. Be awake, sensitive to it, expecting its mysterious workings.

Come, Holy Spirit, Come should be the daily prayer of the faithful, the doubters, the artists, the saints, the sinners, me and you. God acts through us somehow. That is why this old world is never totally lost. God breathes grace, love and redemption through us and out into the world.

Frederick Buechner said, “When your spirit is unusually strong, the life in you unusually alive, you can breathe it out into other’s lives, become literally in-spiring.” The Holy Spirit makes us more than we are, better than we believed we were capable of being.

It also gives us a living hope to anchor us in the unpredictable and unfathomable. God is present in the moment, the day, the year, forever. And the Holy Spirit is highly contagious. Hallelujah! Easy it is to catch, easy it is to pass along. Beautiful how love works.

If you have a breath, you have the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to crawl on our knees for thousands of miles, or show a report card of a perfect life, or even beg for it. It’s ours simply because God loves us. All grace. Pay attention to that small voice inside you. Search your life for the Spirit’s fingerprints. Be aware of whom God puts in your path. There will be a reason. Either they are in service of the Spirit or you are. God is always nudging you, saving you, loving you.

Pray, “Come, Holy Spirit, Come,” and welcome more Easter into your life.

*****I would like to invite you to a special candlelight service of Hope this Wednesday evening at 6:30 at Woodmont Christian Church for the Anniversary of the Covenant tragedy. There will be extraordinary music from Vince Gil, Ellie Holcombe, Lauren Beurlein, Moriah Pirtle and more. I will be giving a homily on hope!*****